About the BuckAI Observatory

Mission · Objectives · Infrastructure · Governance

Origin & Mission

Earth observation satellites now generate roughly 100 TB of data every day — covering optical, radar, gravity, LiDAR, microwave, and magnetic sensors across the globe. Traditional analytical methods cannot scale to these volumes, and they systematically fail to exploit the information encoded across multiple sensor modalities and time-stacked archives. Artificial intelligence is the frontier technology capable of unlocking this data.

The BuckAI Observatory was founded in August 2025 by Director Joachim Moortgat (School of Earth Sciences) with $1 million in five-year seed funding from The Ohio State University's College of Arts and Sciences (2025–2030). The Observatory is housed in OSU's College of Arts and Sciences and draws affiliated faculty from across the 38 units in the college — including Earth Sciences, Geography, Mathematics, Astronomy, Ecology, and Environmental Sciences.

Our mission: build a durable, interdisciplinary community of researchers who apply state-of-the-art AI to large scientific datasets — sharing infrastructure, data pipelines, training resources, and ideas — and position Ohio State as a national leader in applied AI for the natural and mathematical sciences. While Earth observation is our primary focus, the Observatory is explicitly open to any ASC researcher working at the frontier of AI-driven scientific discovery.

Objectives

Seven interconnected objectives guide the Observatory's activities.

  1. Build an AI-for-Science Community Link principal investigators in Earth Sciences, Geography, Mathematics, Astronomy, EEOB, Statistics, and other natural and mathematical science units prior to funding calls — enabling rapid, coordinated responses to short-lead-time opportunities. This is a deliberately symbiotic relationship: domain scientists gain access to state-of-the-art AI methods, while multi-modal observational datasets — from satellite archives to astronomical surveys — offer AI researchers novel, challenging problems far beyond standard benchmarks.
  2. Provide Shared Cyberinfrastructure Upgrade OSU's Unity HPC cluster with modern multi-GPU nodes and up to 1 petabyte of managed, shared storage so research teams can access common datasets and reproducible code across projects. Coordinate with the Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC) for burst capacity, technical support, and optimized storage access.
  3. Professionalize Data Pipelines Employ a college-level data engineer to manage multi-sensor data ingestion, pre-processing, and fusion; establish best practices in version control, documentation, and reproducible AI workflows — so that code and datasets survive beyond individual grant cycles and trainee departures.
  4. Lower Entry Barriers Fund an undergraduate manual-labeling pool to generate training data for supervised AI algorithms; host annual workshops, boot camps, and hackathons; offer faculty training modules in AI methods; and provide "red-team" proposal reviews in partnership with ERIK — all to lower the cost of adopting AI across the natural and mathematical sciences.
  5. Diversify the Funding Portfolio Launch a Joint Industry Consortium of member companies that receive early access to cutting-edge research through annual workshops and reports; collaborate with OSU's Technology Commercialization Office on IP protection and licensing; and partner with OSU Advancement to establish an Endowed Faculty Chair and graduate/postdoctoral fellowships in AI + remote sensing.
  6. Advance Curriculum Coordinate AI, data-centric, and computational course offerings across units; develop an AI certificate program for students in the natural and mathematical sciences; and foster connections between research and the classroom — building a pipeline of AI-ready graduates for academia, government, and industry.
  7. Pursue Foundation Models for Science Pre-train self-supervised neural networks on petabyte-scale scientific datasets — from multi-sensor satellite archives to large astronomical surveys — then fine-tune (transfer learning) these foundation models for specific science objectives, dramatically reducing the labeled data and compute required for each downstream application.

Infrastructure

The Observatory provides shared resources that are difficult to fund through individual grants but essential for college-wide impact.

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GPU Computing
Multi-GPU nodes on OSU's Unity HPC cluster (ASC), dedicated to BuckAI AI workflows. Complemented by Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC) for burst capacity.
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Shared Data Storage
Up to 1 petabyte of managed, shared storage for satellite data archives — eliminating redundant downloads and making datasets accessible across projects.
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Data Engineering
A dedicated college-level data engineer manages data ingestion, multi-sensor fusion, version control, and documentation for the Observatory community.
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Visualization Space
BuckAI Innovation & Data Visualization Space in Mendenhall Laboratory — a dedicated facility for collaboration, demos, seminars, and visiting researchers.
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Weekly Seminars
Regular interdisciplinary research seminars bringing together Observatory members, invited speakers, and industry partners to share results and foster new collaborations.
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Open Source Code
Observatory research code and datasets are shared through the BuckAI GitHub organization, enabling reproducibility and community contributions.

Governance

The BuckAI Observatory is directed by Joachim Moortgat (Professor, School of Earth Sciences), who holds a five-year term appointment running from August 2025 through June 2030.

An internal Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) of four distinguished OSU faculty — Ian Howat, Steven Quiring, Dongbin Xiu, and Yuan-Sen Ting — provides strategic guidance on research direction, infrastructure priorities, and partnerships. The SAB meets regularly with the Director to review progress and provide cross-disciplinary perspective.

More than fifteen affiliated faculty across the College of Arts and Sciences participate in the Observatory's research, seminars, and infrastructure — bringing expertise spanning hydrology, geodesy, ecology, forest science, atmospheric science, numerical mathematics, and astrophysics.

The Observatory is housed in and supported by the College of Arts and Sciences, with additional institutional connections to TDAI, the Ohio Supercomputer Center, the Byrd Polar & Climate Research Center, the Sustainability Institute, and the Translational Data Analytics Institute.

Return on Investment

Strategic seed funding from ASC will catalyze the research programs of 15+ affiliated faculty and, conservatively, enable over $10 million in external funding proposals within five years. These gains will be driven by cross-disciplinary, multi-department collaborations in AI-enhanced Earth observation and related fields across the natural and mathematical sciences. Beyond research, the Observatory enriches student training, modernizes curriculum, and fosters industry partnerships through joint consortia and technology transfer — positioning OSU as a national leader in applied AI for science.

College of Arts & Sciences · School of Earth Sciences · Department of Geography · Department of Mathematics · Department of Astronomy · EEOB · SENR · TDAI · Ohio Supercomputer Center