ThinkingEarth Hackathon: Shaping the Future of AI for Earth

Event

11 September 2025

Through Horizon Europe, EUSPA drives the uptake of space-based solutions across Europe. The ThinkingEarth project is a prime example — and it’s now inviting innovators, developers, and Earth science enthusiasts to its first Hackathon, taking place 29–30 September in Riga, Latvia, as part of the BiDS25 satellite events.

Participants will get hands-on with cutting-edge AI tools — from Copernicus-scale Earth Observation foundation models to graph-based weather forecasting and vision-language models — and co-create new solutions across three open tracks:

🌍 EO Foundation Models – Experiment with large-scale EO models and apply them to tasks like land cover mapping or biomass estimation.
🌦️ Weather Forecasting Models – Compare, evaluate, and push the limits of AI-driven weather prediction.
🛰️ EO Vision-Language Models – Explore how language and imagery can interact to make satellite data more accessible.

What’s in it for you?

Cash prizes: €2,500 / €1,500 / €1,000
Access to datasets, demo notebooks, and mentor support
A chance to shape the future of Earth observation with AI
Visibility at Europe’s biggest data-from-space event

The tracks, challenges, and resources were previewed in our webinar, where participants got an inside look at the tools and strategies available. If you missed it, catch the recording here.

Ready to join?

Register for BiDS25 (free, mandatory for Hackathon participants)
Register for the ThinkingEarth Hackathon
Bring your laptop, curiosity, and ideas!

Don’t just watch the future of EO and AI unfold — build it.

Useful links

BiDS25

ThinkingEarth Hackathon

Earth Observation (EO) is entering a new era where models are no longer tied to a single data type. From optical to radar, multispectral to hyperspectral, each modality provides a distinct environmental signal but leveraging them together in a unified framework has remained a challenge. Recent advances such as DOFA (Domain-Oriented Feature Adaptation) and DOFA-CLIP are addressing these gaps, offering promising directions for large-scale, adaptive EO understanding — directions highly relevant to the goals of ThinkingEarth.

ThinkingEarth Talks: World Food Programme

News Item

29 July 2025

ThinkingEarth Talks: World Food Programme

The ThinkingEarth project sat down with Duccio Piovani from the World Food Programme to get an inside look on how Earth Observation and sentinel data can impact food insecurity across the globe.

Tackling Food Insecurity with ThinkingEarth

News Item

13 June 2025

Tackling Food Insecurity with ThinkingEarth

Food insecurity is becoming one of the most urgent global challenges of our time. In 2023, alone, more than 345 million people were projected to be food insecure—more than double the number just three years earlier. The causes are complex: poverty, conflict, economic shocks, and especially climate change, which disrupts food systems through droughts, floods, and extreme weather events that reduce crop yields and damage infrastructure.

Stay tuned and subscribe to our quarterly newsletter

By submitting your e-mail address, you agree to our privacy policy for the site.