Outline of a Novel Approach for Identifying Ethical Issues in Early Stages of AI4EO Research

Academic research and literature discussing ethical issues in Earth Observation (EO) or Remote Sensing (RS) research are scant. Yet, ethical concerns, particularly those linked to privacy [1], [2], explainability and bias [3], [4], are growing in relevance as AI and Machine Learning (ML) models are adopted to study and analyze petabytes of EO/RS data (hereinafter referred to as “AI4EO research”). AI/ML models have been used in EO and RS sciences for decades [5]. However, ethical issues take center stage as the resolution of EO/RS data increases rapidly, and as newer sources of data are fused with EO/RS data to achieve better results at lower costs and greater speeds.