Charles Wachira

Charles Wachira is a Software Engineer, Manager, and Technical Lead for Geospatial AI Cloud Platform at IBM Research - Africa. The Geospatial AI Cloud Platform is an integrated cloud-native platform in Climate & Sustainability research organisation for creating and running geospatial AI models. The platform is comprised of a fine-tuning studio for creating AI models, an inference lab for running AI models, and a data discovery module for fast data retrieval and processing. The platform enables users to quickly and easily leverage the power of the latest geospatial AI models—including foundation models—to build solutions for their own use cases. Broadly, Climate & Sustainability is comprised of multidisciplinary scientists and engineers across eight IBM Research labs who explore how the convergence of AI, Hybrid Cloud and Quantum can accelerate climate and sustainability solutions. This includes an ongoing collaboration with NASA to develop the Prithvi family of geospatial AI foundation models, a set of flexible base models that can be efficiently fine-tuned for a range of tasks using earth observations, climate projections, and other geospatial data. Charles earned his B.S. (Hons) at the Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, University of Nairobi, Kenya.