Democratizing Earth Observation with Foundation Models: The TESSERA Project and Embedding Explorer
Time: Tue 2026-05-12 14.30 - 15.30
Location: Digital Futures hub, Osquars Backe 5, floor 2 at KTH main campus OR Zoom
Video link: https://kth-se.zoom.us/j/69560887455
Speaker: Srinivasan Keshav, University of Cambridge
Abstract: Foundation models for Earth observation (EO) promise to transform how we monitor and understand our planet, yet the computational cost of training and deploying such models risks concentrating their benefits among a small number of well-resourced institutions. In this talk, I present TESSERA, a foundation model for Earth observation that generates rich semantic embeddings from Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 imagery at 10-metre global resolution. I discuss the architectural and data engineering choices underpinning TESSERA, situating them within the rapidly evolving landscape of EO foundation models, and highlight the downstream tasks — from deforestation detection to habitat mapping — that these embeddings support.
A key ambition of the TESSERA project is to make state-of-the-art EO embeddings freely and practically accessible to researchers, policymakers, and conservation practitioners worldwide, including those without access to large-scale GPU infrastructure. To this end, I demonstrate the TESSERA Embedding Explorer (TEE), a lightweight, browser-based tool that allows users to interactively visualize, query, and analyse TESSERA embeddings over any region of interest without requiring specialized hardware or software. I discuss how tools like TEE can lower the barrier to entry for sophisticated geospatial analysis and reflect on the broader challenge of operationalizing foundation model outputs for real-world environmental decision-making.