AI and the World's Hard Problems · Medicine & drug discovery · Google Research · 2026-10-06
Unlocking Earth AI’s planetary geospatial foundation models for global public health
Public health decisions are often slowed by reporting lags, siloed data, and sparse data. Google's Population Dynamics Foundation Model (PDFM) compresses privacy-preserving search trends, human mobility, built-environment density, and environmental factors into location embeddings. These embeddings can be plugged into existing epidemiological models without task-specific fine-tuning, and five partner case studies were presented.