About Georges

Engineering artificial intelligence and machine learning systems on-board a flying spacecraft. Pretty cool people manager as well.

Firsts

The world of AI in space is obsessed with being the first at achieving anything in orbit. Here are Georges’ contributions onboard the European Space Agency’s OPS-SAT-1 spacecraft:

• November 8, 2020: First to run a neural network model onboard a satellite (TensorFlow CNN image classifier).
• April 16, 2021: First to train supervised machine learning models onboard a satellite (Initially with online learning for FDIR and then generalized with onboard ML as-a-Service).
• June 26, 2021 & February 16, 2022: First to train unsupervised machine learning models onboard a satellite (k-means for image clustering in 2021 and image segmentation in 2022).
• September 29, 2023: First to run Generative AI onboard a satellite (WGANs to denoise corrupt images).

Awards / Nominations

Georges develops and operationalizes AI technology demonstrators on-board the European Space Agency’s OPS-SAT Space Lab. His research focuses on leveraging edge computing for in-orbit machine learning and autonomous decision-making. Sometimes, his work gets recognized:

• Recipient of the International SpaceOps 2023 Award for Outstanding Achievement.
• Co-Chair at the IEEE AeroConf session in Machine Learning / Artificial Intelligence for Aerospace Applications.

Leadership

An experienced and empathetic people manager, notably as an Engineering Manager for digital product engineering. Georges thrives in environments with shifting priorities from ideation to delivery with diverse stakeholders across multiple teams in different time zones. He enjoys coaching, mentoring, growth, and retaining talent, as well as developing high impact collaborative relationships with product managers.

Entrepreneur

Tanagra Space, Georges’ Estonian-based AI consultancy, supports the European Space Agency’s OPS-SAT mission control team at the European Space Operations Center (ESOC) in Darmstadt, Germany. He also founded Open Data Kosovo, a leading civic-tech non-profit with a global footprint.

Education

• B.S. in Software Engineering from the University of Ottawa, Canada.
• M.A. in International Affairs from the New School University in New York, NY.
• M.S. in Spacecraft Design from Luleå University of Technology in Kiruna, Sweden.