Patrick Johnson

Senior Software Engineer at Allen Institute for AI

Seattle, Washington

About

I work at the intersection of geospatial technologies, machine learning, and environmental impact. I'm passionate about leveraging technology to drive positive environmental change, with a focus on wildland fire management and earth observation. With a strong background in software development and a deep love for the outdoors, I bring both technical depth and personal motivation to this work.

If you're working on similar projects or share an interest in these areas, I'd love to connect and explore potential collaborations.

Experience

Senior Software Engineer 2021 - Present Allen Institute for AI (AI2) Member of the OlmoEarth team, building a multimodal geospatial intelligence platform that transforms satellite imagery, radar, and elevation data into actionable insights.
Senior Software Engineer 2007 - 2021 Google Nearly 14 years across infrastructure, developer platforms, and user-facing products. Roles included Technical Lead for datacenter modeling, backend engineer on Google Contacts and People API, and early contributor to Chrome and the Caffeine web indexing system.

Publications

High-Resolution LFMC Maps for Wildfire Risk From Multimodal Earth Observation Data Patrick Alan Johnson, Gabriel Tseng, Yawen Zhang, Heather Heward, Virginia Sjahli, Favyen Bastani, Joseph Redmon, Patrick Beukema. TerraBytes 2025.
OlmoEarth: Stable Latent Image Modeling for Multimodal Earth Observation Henry Herzog, Favyen Bastani, Yawen Zhang, Gabriel Tseng, Joseph Redmon, ... Patrick Alan Johnson, ... Patrick Beukema. arXiv 2025.
Self-Supervised Multi-Modal World Model with 4D Space-Time Embedding Lance Legel, Qingju Huang, Brandon Voelker, Daniel Neamati, Patrick Alan Johnson, Favyen Bastani, J. Rose, James R. Hennessy, Robert P. Guralnick, Douglas Soltis, Pamela S. Soltis, Shaowen Wang. arXiv 2026.

Education

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

M.S. CyberGIS & Geospatial Data Science

2023 - 2025
University of California, San Diego

B.S. Computer Science

2003 - 2007

Volunteering

Volunteer Teacher / TA 2015 - 2022 TEALS Program Taught Intro to Computer Science, Advanced Projects, and Data Structures and Algorithms at a local high school in Redmond, WA as part of Microsoft's TEALS program, connecting tech-industry workers with classroom teachers.

Tinkering

UTM vs Web Mercator

Interactive map visualization comparing UTM and Web Mercator coordinate grids. Includes a guided tour showing how the grids diverge at different latitudes.