Remote Sensing Multimodal Large Model Wins "New Model" Innovation Achievement Award at China International Digital Economy Expo

Recently, the series of remote sensing multimodal large model developed by the research group led by Professor Huang Xiaomeng from the Department of Earth System Science (DESS) at Tsinghua University was awarded the "New Model" Innovation Achievement Award at the 2025 China International Digital Economy Expo (CIDEE). Featuring an innovative multimodal fusion architecture and leveraging massive remote sensing datasets, the model significantly enhances the capability of feature extraction and generalization adaptability, enabling holistic and in-depth interpretation of remote sensing images.

GloHydro: Global Hydroelectric Power Monitoring Platform

In the field of remote sensing image analysis, the lack of diversity in annotated data for target detection and poor adaptability to complex scenarios have long been core challenges restricting practical applications. Based on the remote sensing multimodal large model, the research team applied artificial intelligence technologies to automatically analyze remote sensing images of more than 8 million rivers worldwide, and constructed GloHydro (https://glohydro.cn) — a global top-down hydropower plant database platform. Notably, over 50% of the hydropower plant locations in GloHydro are not covered by existing public datasets.

By integrating reanalysis data, GloHydro not only contains the precise spatial information of global hydropower plants but also records the long-term runoff data of each hydropower plant worldwide since 1980. This platform effectively fills the data gap in the dynamic monitoring of global hydropower facilities, and provides accurate support for key research and application scenarios such as the assessment of global water resource allocation, collaborative management of transboundary river basins, and traceability of the environmental impacts of hydropower development.

About the Expo

Approved by the Party Central Committee and the State Council, the China International Digital Economy Expo (CIDEE) is the only national-level expo in China named after the digital economy. With the theme of "Trustworthy Data Empowering Industrial Development", the 2025 expo focused on the cutting-edge development trends in the digital economy, gathering frontier technologies and groundbreaking achievements of global digital science and technology in artificial intelligence, intelligent manufacturing, digital economy and other fields.

About the “New Model” Innovative Achievement Award

Li Jiahao, a PhD candidate from the Department of Earth System Science (DESS) at Tsinghua University, is the first completer of the achievement, with Professor Huang Xiaomeng as the supervisor. Co-authors include Pan Jiancheng, Sun Yuze and other PhD candidates from the Tsinghua DESS.

Written by Li Jiahao

Edited by Wang Jiayin

Reviewed by Geng Rui