Barbara Metzler, PhD

I am a Senior Data Scientist at BBC Verify, where I use satellite imagery, geospatial data and open-source techniques to investigate and verify stories in the news.

My background is in machine learning and AI, with a focus on foundation models and their applications across domains, including geospatial AI. Shortly before joining BBC Verify, I was a founding engineer at a geospatial tech startup. Before that, I was a researcher at The Alan Turing Institute, where I worked on projects including:

• Are you smarter than a foundation model? (online game)
• DemoLand
• EuroFab

I obtained my PhD at Imperial College London as part of the Global Environmental Health Research Group and the Pathways to Equitable Healthy Cities collaboration. My PhD research focused on characterising urban development with high-resolution satellite imagery and self-supervised deep learning in Sub-Saharan Africa.

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