I was delighted to participate in the CERN for Climate Action Day event, organised by CIPEA, this October 2025. CIPEA is the CERN Innovation Programme on Environmental Applications, under whose umbrella falls the Edge SpAIce project that I lead at CERN. During this half-day event, representatives from many of the projects under the CIPEA banner presented their work. I was particularly impressed and motivated by the work happening in the area of nuclear energy. I learned about CERN’s Fusion Technology Coordination Unit, who cooperate with multiple public and private entities in the nuclear fusion sector. This encompasses magnetic technology, materials analysis, and more. Another impressive project is so-called “Accelerator Driven Systems”, that explores bombarding nuclear fission waste products with accelerated particles to speed up the decay of long half life isotopes into faster decaying or stable nuclei. This technology has the potential to greatly aid in the management of nuclear waste products.

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I presented the Edge SpAIce project, focussing on detecting plastics pollution in the oceans with Earth Observation satellites. I included our most recent results on the tech side showing that we are able to achieve a higher throughput and lower power usage with the same image segmentation Neural Network using hls4ml than can be achieved with Vitis AI.