Simon Grüning

The askEarth search engine offers the public an easy-to-use tool to validate newspaper articles and explore unique information, giving them access to Earth Observation (EO) insights in one click. In recent years, the public trust in media has been falling. Among EU citizens, more than 25% state that they believe to have been often or very often exposed to disinformation in the past week. EO images are a powerful tool to fight this disinformation and provide traceable information if presented in a comprehensible manner.

Global EO data has been gathered for approximately 50 years (Landsat-1 satellite launched in 1972). Yet there remain significant shortcomings when it comes to transforming this data into insightful and accessible information. Currently, gaining insights from EO is mainly reserved for data scientists. The aim of askEarth is to democratize the access to EO information by targeting the B2C (business to consumer) market with an intuitive EO search engine powered by Natural Language Processing.

Affiliation: Dr. Claudia Röösli

Start date: 09/2022

• Simon Grüning co-founded the UZH Spin-off askEarth in 2022

• askEarth was selected to join the Swiss Space Incubator ESA BIC Switzerland