Patrick Beukema

Hi! I’m Patrick, a scientist and engineer passionate about building breakthrough AI for good. I lead an AI team at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (Ai2), where we develop large-scale, mixed-modality planetary models supporting a range of applications—including climate science, wildfire management, agriculture and food security, maritime intelligence, conservation and sustainability, biodiversity, and ecosystem health, as well as the many interconnections between them. You can learn more about my team’s work here.
Before AI2, I worked in applied machine learning across startups, tech, and academia (CMU, McGill, and U. Pitt). I earned my Ph.D. from the Center for Neuroscience and the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition at CMU, where my research focused on neural plasticity, learning, and decoding. Earlier, I explored recurrent neural networks and causal inference. As an undergrad at McGill, I studied math and logic and spent a lot of time riding a beautiful Marinoni through Montreal’s icy streets.
I live in the majestic Pacific Northwest with my wife and two young boys. Lately, I’ve been diving into home espresso—something that’s proving quite useful!
Mar 6, 2025 | “Atlantes” (global scale GPS modeling) accepted at ICLR CCAI! |
Mar 1, 2025 | “Lighthouse” (high res coastal mapping) accepted at ICLR ML4RS! |
Feb 15, 2025 | Invited keynote at CVPR 2025 EarthVision, register here |
Feb 13, 2025 | New paper on foundation modeling arXiv, research led by Gabriel Tseng. |
Feb 5, 2025 | Abstract accepted at the 1st NASA/ESA Foundation Modeling conference |
Feb 1, 2025 | Hiring multiple roles (Scientists/Engineers) to build and scale earth-system! |
Dec 1, 2024 | Hiring an AI intern to build next gen multi-modal foundation models for earth! |
May 30, 2024 | “Beyond AGI: Building AI for the Planet” Thursday, May 30, 2024, 4 – 6 p.m. |
Apr 18, 2024 | Interview on the MLOps podcast: Can AI help save the planet |
Mar 15, 2024 | Blog post: Accelerating Engineering with LLMS |
Feb 25, 2024 | We have open positions for an AI engineer and an AI intern! |
Jan 26, 2024 | Invited talk on “Data and High Performance AI” at ESIP |
Jan 1, 2024 | Recognized as one of the top 5 AI engineers working on sustainability. |
Dec 17, 2023 | Best paper award at NeurIPS Computational Sustainability |
Dec 6, 2023 | “Satellite Imagery and AI: A New Era…” NeurIPS 2023 Comp Sust: arXiv |
Oct 10, 2023 | Recognized as one of the top 100 people in AI by Business Insider. |
Oct 1, 2023 | Released two new CV models for vessel detection in Sentinel-1/2 imagery. |
Sep 18, 2023 | “Shedding Light on Shadowed Waters: Geospatial CV…” @ NOAA AI |