Mission to Planet Earth: AI Views the World

In the late 1990s, NASA will launch a series of satellites to study the Earth as a dynamic system. The information system required to manage data from these satellites will be one of the world's largest, requiring a capacity about 1,000 times the size of the Library of Congress. The enormous size of the data holdings and the complexity of the information system pose several challenges to computer scientists, and promise to test the limits of practical AI techniques. This article illustrates a few of these challenges by describing a system called the Intelligent Information Fusion System.