AI in the sky | Folio
https://www.ualberta.ca/en/folio/2026/05/ai-in-the-sky-abigail-azari.html
Publish Date: 2026-05-26 07:54:00
Source Domain: www.ualberta.ca
For most people, backyard space exploration is about peering up at the skies through a telescope, but for Abigail Azari, it means using artificial intelligence to study the planets in Earth’s solar system — and keep a watchful eye on what the heavens can throw at us.
Working to improve the application of AI in interpreting huge amounts of data gathered by satellites, Azari, an assistant professor in the University of Alberta’s Faculty of Science and Faculty of Engineering, wants to help answer important scientific questions about what can affect our planetary neighbourhood, like space weather.
Azari is one of 25 new faculty members focused on advancing AI research, announced last week at the Upper Bound conference hosted by the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii). Thanks to a $30-million investment from the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research through Amii, the goal is to bring together some of the world’s best minds in artificial intelligence from a wide range of fields including engineering, environmental science, education and health.
“Applying machine learning to the observations spacecraft return can help us better understand planetary systems and extend our physical theories,” she says.
Using a “physics-informed” machine learning approach can help researchers narrow down and identify the most relevant observations and pick the best conditions that improve our understanding of questions they’re exploring, Azari explains. “If a model suggests a density or temperature that is physically impossible, for example, we can use physics-informed AI to make a decision to discard it.
“It can help weigh the possible solutions, to say one is more probable than another.”
Having a more comprehensive understanding of space environments and their dynamics can help more accurately predict the timing of space weather phenomena that can affect the Earth, including auroras, as well as more disruptive…
