October 14th, 2026 | 2:00 PM CEST
Live on Microsoft Teams.
On October 14th, the ESA Φ-Lab Collaborative Innovation Network will host a new Φ-talk. Details are below.
Meet the speaker
Lorenzo Nava is an AI+ Academic Senior Fellow (Associate Professor) at King’s College London, working at the intersection of artificial intelligence, Earth observation, and natural hazard science. His research investigates how natural hazards evolve and develops approaches for monitoring and forecasting mountain hazards and their cascading effects. He serves as Chair of the Working Group on Educational Materials within the UN Global Initiative on Resilience to Natural Hazards through AI Solutions, where he coordinates international activities on capacity building for the use of AI in disaster risk reduction. Before joining King’s, Lorenzo was a Research Associate at the University of Cambridge. He holds a PhD in Geosciences from the University of Padova.
Talk abstract
Mountain hazards such as landslides, avalanches, and glacial lake outburst floods are among the most destructive processes in mountain regions and can interact to generate complex cascading events. Earth observation provides an increasingly powerful means of monitoring these processes across large, often inaccessible regions, but moving from observation to prediction remains a major challenge. In this talk, Lorenzo will present recent work combining satellite observations, artificial intelligence, and physical modeling to address this challenge. He will first show how AI and Earth observation can support rapid landslide detection following major events, then explore how repeated satellite observations can reveal slope motion and potential instability prior to failure. He will then discuss how neural emulation of physical models can enable scalable prediction of post-failure dynamics and cascading effects. Together, these examples will explore how we can move from detecting what has happened to identifying what may happen next, and ultimately towards forecasting mountain hazards and their cascades.
Register Here!