Yawen Zhang
Currently, I am a Senior ML Engineer at the Allen Institute for AI (Ai2), working on building AI models and systems from research to real-world deployment. Previously, I was a Research Scientist at Google X and Mineral.ai, where I developed production ML models for crop yield forecasting and conducted research on multimodal models and LLMs.
I graduated with a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Colorado Boulder (advisor: Qin Lv), where I worked closely with domain scientists, including atmospheric, fisheries, and seismology experts from organizations such as CIRES, NOAA, and LLNL, to develop ML models for real-world scientific problems.
Outside of work, I enjoy hiking, swimming, and exploring new foods and recipes.
Recent News
MAY 2026 • We released OlmoEarth v1.1, a new family of models that cuts compute costs by up to 3x! 🚀 [Ai2 Blog] [Paper] [Code]
MAR 2026 • Our tutorial "Getting Started with OlmoEarth: From Embeddings to Fine-tuning" has been accepted at the ICLR 2026 Workshop on Machine Learning for Remote Sensing!
FEB 2026 • Our paper OlmoEarth: Stable Latent Image Modeling for Multimodal Earth Observation has been accepted at CVPR 2026. See you in Denver! 🏔️
DEC 2025 • Gave a talk "OlmoEarth: From Foundation Model Research to an End-to-End EO Platform" at the CS4Env seminar at the University of Washington.
NOV 2025 • We released OlmoEarth! 🌍 [Ai2 Blog] [Paper] [Code] [Platform]
JUL 2025 • Two papers accepted at ICML 2025. See you in Vancouver, Canada! 🍁
- High-Resolution Live Fuel Moisture Content (LFMC) Maps for Wildfire Risk from Multimodal Earth Observation Data – TerraBytes: Towards Global Datasets and Models for Earth Observation Workshop
- Are Time Series Foundation Models Ready for Zero-Shot Forecasting? – Foundation Models for Structured Data Workshop
JUN 2025 • Invited Simon Ilyushchenko from Google to present his work on Earth Agents at our Environmental AI Seminar.
MAY 2025 • Presented "Full Lifecycle of EO-based AI Foundation Models: Lessons Learned from Real-World Deployment" at the first ESA-NASA International Workshop on AI Foundation Model for EO.
MAY 2025 • The Landsat vessel detection model has been successfully deployed in Skylight (now public! 🎉), and added to the paper Satellite Imagery and AI: A New Era in Ocean Conservation, from Research to Deployment and Impact (Version. 2.0).