The Sustainable Futures initiative supports startups to build accelerated computing applications for climate, clean energy, sustainable infrastructure, and more.
素材由 Vibrant Planet. 提供
Whether it's monitoring tiny insects or providing insights from satellites in space, NVIDIA-accelerated startups are making every day Earth Day.
Sustainable Futures, an initiative of NVIDIA Inception for cutting-edge startups, is supporting more than 750 companies around the world focused on agriculture, carbon capture, clean energy, climate and weather, environmental analytics, green computing, sustainable infrastructure, waste management, and more.
In this article, we'll take a look at five of these sustainability-focused startups and learn how they're leveraging accelerated computing and the NVIDIA Earth-2 climate technology platform to advance their work.
Earth-2 has a suite of AI models that help simulate weather and climate, create weather and climate visualizations, and provide relevant actionable insights.
Insect farming is catching up with the AI wave
Image courtesy of Bug Mars
As the climate continues to change, food security – the ability to produce and provide enough food to meet the nutritional needs of all people – has become a key element of resilience to environmental change. Farming edible insects such as crickets and black soldier flies is one solution that can reduce human reliance on protein-intensive livestock farming.
Bug Mars, a startup based in Ontario, Canada, uses AI tools to help with the production of insect protein. These tools can monitor variables such as temperature, pest and insect populations, and use this data to predict problems and recommend actions, which can help insect farmers increase yields by up to 30%.
The company uses NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano modules to speed up its work, and recently announced that it will use synthetic data and digital twin technology to further advance the development of AI solutions for insect farming.
Protect every tree in the forest
Vibrant Planet, based in Draqueque, California, is modeling trillions of trees and other flammable vegetation such as shrubs and meadows to help land managers, localities, and fire districts across North America build resilience to wildfires and climate change.
NVIDIA's hardware and software helped Vibrant Planet develop transformer models for forest and ecosystem management and AI-enhanced operations planning.
效果图由 Vibrant Planet 提供
The startup collects and analyzes data from lidar sensors, satellites, and aircraft to train AI models to map vegetation with high accuracy, estimate tree canopy height, and detect characteristics of forests and vegetation areas, such as carbon, water, biodiversity, and built infrastructure. Users can use this data to understand fire and drought hazards, and use these insights to plan scenarios and predict the effects of actions such as potential forest thinning, planned burning, and more.
Make a forecast for tomorrow
Boston-based Tomorrow.io is a leading environmental response platform that helps businesses adapt to increasing weather and climate fluctuations. The startup leverages next-generation space technology, advanced AI models, and homegrown modeling capabilities to enable businesses and governments to mitigate risks in advance, ensure effective responses, and drive critical decisions.
Image courtesy of Tomorrow.io
The startup is developing weather forecasting AI and will launch its own satellites to collect environmental data to further train its models. The company is also experimenting with the Earth-2 AI forecasting model to determine the optimal configuration of satellites to create better weather forecasting conditions.
Tomorrow.io is working with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation on a project in Kenya that plans to send daily reminders to 6 million farmers about when to water crops, when to spray pesticides, when to harvest or when to switch to other crops due to local climate change. The team hopes to expand the beneficiary base to 100 million farmers in Africa by 2030.
Capture the change of wind
Palo Alto, California-based WindBorne Systems is developing a weather-sensing balloon equipped with WeatherMesh, the most advanced AI model for real-time global weather forecasts available today.
图片由 WindBorne Systems提供
WeatherMesh can predict factors such as surface temperature, air pressure, wind, precipitation, and radiation. Unlike traditional models that run on supercomputers, this model has world record accuracy and is light enough to run on gaming laptops.
WindBorne uses NVIDIA GPUs to develop its AI, and the company is also an early user of Earth-2.
Measure the temperature of cities around the world
FortyGuard is an Abu Dhabi-based, Miami-based startup. The company is developing a system that uses AI models to measure urban heat, providing insights to public health departments, urban planners, landscape architects, and environmental engineers.
FortyGuard was demoed on the show stage at NVIDIA GTC
As an early adopter of the Earth-2 platform, the company hopes to use its temperature measurement AI models to provide a more granular urban heat map and use the data to help industry and governments create cooler, more livable cities.
FortyGuard's technology is available through application programming interfaces that integrate with existing enterprise platforms for use cases such as temperature-based turn-by-turn navigation, EV performance improvement predictions, real estate insights, and more.
To learn more about the Sustainable Future initiative at NVIDIA GTC's AI Nation & Sustainable Futures Day, click here:
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