Gustau Camps-Valls

Research vision

My work lives at the intersection of machine learning and Earth sciences. I focus on AI algorithms that not only predict but advance our understanding of the Earth system. Causal and equation discovery, as well as hybrid models that integrate domain knowledge, help build a more resilient and trustworthy understanding of our changing climate.

My journey began with uncovering fundamental global patterns from the spatiotemporal dynamics of the carbon and water cycles and global crop photosynthesis, to defining new indices to monitoring the Earth vegetation with machine learning models .

To move the field toward process-based reasoning, I helped establish the current paradigm of Deep learning and process understanding for Earth system science and contributed to foundational books on both kernel machines and deep learning for satellite remote sensing, geosciences and climate sciences. These works argue that AI must not only predict but also respect physical laws—a philosophy that has evolved into a new generation of next-generation Earth system models, which require a distinct attitude: interdisciplinary collaboration across communities and fostering your genuine curiosity and serendipity.

My work focuses on hybrid and physics-aware AI and causality to model and understand the Earth system, with special emphasis on decoding the why behind climate extreme events. This includes inferring the causes of ecosystem change and providing the community with a roadmap for causal inference in time series as well as discovering laws and equations from observational data. We are now pushing the boundaries of AI foundation models for Earth observation and building early warning systems for complex climate risks ensuring that machine learning provides the transparent and physically-consistent insights needed for a sustainable future.

About me, the person

Outside of research, I am driven by jazz 🎷, basketball 🏀, the philosophy of science 📖, and the art of photo-haikus 📸✍️. Actually, if you want to read my thoughts in between AI, philosophy, art and life just read my stories in Medium.