Welcome to the GAIA Lab Retreat website!
We are excited to announce this lab retreat, which will bring together researchers, engineers, and students from the institut de physique du globe de Paris (IPGP) and partner institutions to explore how artificial intelligence can help us better understand Earth and planetary systems. Hosted at the école de physique des Houches in the French Alps, the retreat is designed as an open, collaborative, and interactive space combining scientific discussions, hands-on work, and informal exchanges in an inspiring mountain setting.
This is not a traditional conference: it is a lab retreat, an off-site gathering intended to encourage open exchange, collective learning, and the emergence of new ideas and collaborations beyond our usual day-to-day working environment. The program will include a mix of invited presentations, practical sessions, and ample time for cross-disciplinary discussion.
Importantly, this retreat will also be an opportunity to present and formally launch the AI working group of IPGP, a new initiative aimed at bringing together researchers and engineers around shared interests in data-driven and AI-based approaches in the Earth and planetary sciences (in particular around AI-related teaching, model development and storage, shared resources, and best practices).
Scientific rationale
Our current understanding of the Earth system is challenged by the complexity of the processes we seek to unravel. Over the past two decades, advances in instrumentation have greatly improved our ability to observe natural phenomena with unprecedented precision. At the same time, the growing volume of data has led to the development of curated repositories that now serve the entire scientific community. Yet, our ability to fully interpret and model these high-resolution observations remains limited by the lack of a comprehensive formalism capable of capturing the multi-scale and multi-physics couplings revealed by these data.
Since the 1990s, IPGP played a pioneering role in the development of inversion methods. It has also been a major driver in the creation of database infrastructures that provide access to a wide range of Earth system data (Gaia Data and Form@Terre projects).
We now find ourselves at a pivotal moment where strengthening our expertise in artificial intelligence (AI) has become essential to tackle the next generation of scientific challenges. Emerging AI approaches offer powerful new opportunities to extract information from complex datasets, bridge scales, and integrate observations with physical models, opening exciting pathways for scientific discovery.
With the GAIA Lab Retreat, we hope to support this transition and strengthen our collective expertise. The retreat will provide a space for sharing experiences, discussing recent developments, and exploring both theoretical and practical advancements in AI methodologies tailored to our disciplines.
Tentative program
The discussions, presentations, and hands-on sessions will focus on the following scientific domains. Please note that the session scopes are tentative and may evolve. If you would like to share ideas or suggest modifications, please feel free to contact us.
- Volcanic system dynamics and eruption forecasting
- Seismic signal analysis and earthquake detection
- Hydrological responses to extreme climatic events
- Planetary surface modeling and remote sensing
- AI methodologies for image analysis, time-series modeling, and physics-informed learning
