KAUST, in collaboration with the Communications, Space and Technology Commission (CST) and Meta, has launched a Terragraph Wi-Fi project to bring high-speed internet to the Modern Architectural Contracting Company (MACC) camp near KAUST. The project utilizes Meta's Terragraph technology, a gigabit wireless system operating in the 57-71GHz band, to provide a low-cost, high-speed alternative to fiber. Weather stations will monitor climate variables affecting the hybrid RF/FSO links, validating KAUST's research in extreme bandwidth communication. Why it matters: This deployment demonstrates a practical solution for delivering affordable, high-speed internet access to underserved communities in the region, leveraging advanced wireless technologies and KAUST's research capabilities.
KAUST's Terragraph Connectivity Project received second rank in the Social Project category of the Global Excellence Awards by the Project Management Institute (PMI) in Saudi Arabia. The project, in collaboration with Meta and the Communications, Space and Technology Commission (CST), provided high-speed Wi-Fi to a camp of 3000+ people outside KAUST. The deployed hybrid radio frequency and free space optics technology offers reliable internet connection to a remote community. Why it matters: The award and project showcase KAUST's contribution to bridging the digital divide in line with Saudi Vision 2030's goals for sustainable development and digital inclusion.
MBZUAI researchers introduce TerraFM, a scalable self-supervised learning model for Earth observation that uses Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 imagery. The model unifies radar and optical inputs through modality-specific patch embeddings and adaptive cross-attention fusion. TerraFM achieves strong generalization on classification and segmentation tasks, outperforming prior models on GEO-Bench and Copernicus-Bench.