Johannes Jakubik

Johannes is a Postdoc within the AI for Climate Impact team at IBM Research Europe. His work mainly focuses on pretraining and finetuning foundations models for earth observation and weather modeling in collaboration with NASA. As of summer 2024, he is involved in research projects with NASA, ESA, and within the EU Horizon program. He is actively collaborating with researchers from academic institutions like MIT, Oxford, and ETH.

Johannes holds a PhD in applied deep learning that has been awarded with an outstanding dissertation award (summa cum laude). His main research interests are in the context of multi-modality for foundation models and the combination of observational data with re-analysis data. Besides his work on foundation models and multi-modality, he is researching ways to infuse machine learning and deep learning in quantum applications, like the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm.

Before joining IBM as a Postdoc, he served a PhD student at one of Germany's universities of excellence, the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), focusing on data-centric deep learning. His dissertation provides a set of scalable methods to systematically enhance data for deep learning achieving substantial performance improvements. The associated works on deep learning have been accepted at prime conferences like NeurIPS, AAAI, and ECML, and his publications on applications of deep learning have been published in top-tier journals like Productions and Operations Management (Financial Times Top 50) and the European Journal of Operational Research. For the first 18 months of his PhD, Johannes additionally served as an affiliated research member at ETH Zurich where he also had authored his master's thesis. He then joined IBM Research as a visiting PhD student.

At Think'23 and Think'24, his work on foundation models for earth observation and weather modeling was presented by the IBM global leadership. End of 2023, this work has been recognized with IBM's Outstanding Research Accomplishment.

In summer 2024, Johannes received the NASA Honor Award from Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) for his contributions to foundation models for earth observations.