EarthDaily and the IBM Research Quantum System Site Visit

Special thanks to the IBM Research team for hosting EarthDaily at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center last week. We were honored to meet the Geospatial team and tour the Think Lab, where we saw the IBM Quantum systems (see picture above and below) and the experimental AI-optimized cloud-native supercomputer.

The EarthDaily team included our VP of Strategy, VP of Engineering, and other executives. As a former IBM'er, I was incredibly excited to see and impressed with the facility, the people, and the inventions. I have always wanted to see the facility, designed by Eero Saarinen and completed in 1961, and meet some of the over 1,500 scientists, engineers, and designers at work in the Lab.

What was especially exciting was learning more about IBM's public/private partnership involving NASA and IBM Research that has led to the release of NASA's first open-source geospatial artificial intelligence (AI) foundation model for Earth observation data.

Of course, it's always more exciting to see and touch something. Not just for the US President and Aravind, but for anyone to behold this marvel. The IBM Quantum computer makes most of the world’s existing encryption algorithms obsolete.

My favorite Quantum Use Case is with ExxonMobil and IBM and how they collaborated to model maritime inventory routing on quantum devices, analyzing the strengths and trade-offs of different strategies for vehicle and inventory routing, and laying the foundation for constructing practical solutions for their operations.

The AI-optimized cloud-native supercomputer also blew us away. We learned how IBM realized that building an AI supercomputer with an architecture designed to build and train massive AI models would be beneficial to its research efforts and, eventually, its customers.

In summary, we would like to thank the IBM Research team for their time and all of their efforts in making our world and space a better place.