Horizon Europe’s ThinkingEarth Hackathon: innovate for Earth Observation

Through Horizon Europe, EUSPA stimulates the development of the EU Space downstream sector and supports the uptake of space-based solutions. EUSPA-funded project ThinkingEarth exemplifies this mission in action.

The project is inviting innovators and Earth science enthusiasts to its first Hackathon. The event will explore cutting-edge assets developed by ThinkingEarth’s researchers — from large-scale EO foundation models to graph-based weather forecasting tools and vision-language models.

The Hackathon will take place on 29 and 30 September in Riga, Latvia, as part of the Big Data from Space 2025 (BiDS25) satellite events.

Participants will have a chance to experiment with state-of-the-art AI tools and co-create new solutions across three open-ended, hands-on thematic tracks.

Thematic Tracks

Track 1 – EO Foundation Models

This track aims to explore the potential of large-scale EO foundation models through hands-on experiments and analysis. Target is open-ended exploration, encouraging participants to pursue their own use cases, build new tools, and uncover insights using EO foundation models.

A list of EO foundation models developed in ThinkingEarth will be provided, along with a list of example downstream tasks such as land cover classification or biomass estimation (participants can also choose on their own), and a demo notebook fine-tuning one EO foundation model on one or two downstream tasks.

Track 2 – Weather Forecasting Models

Weather forecasting models are designed to predict a broad range of climate variables, though they often emphasize certain variables over others. The vast number and complexity of these variables make it challenging to assess a model’s general ability to capture diverse climate phenomena. While some evaluation approaches exist, there is no widely adopted standard, which makes it difficult to consistently evaluate and compare the performance of these models, especially in downstream tasks.

This track invites participants to explore, evaluate and compare leading weather forecasting models through hands-on experimentation and in-depth analysis. Emphasizing open-ended exploration, participants are encouraged to pursue their own use cases and gain deeper insights into the strengths, limitations and overall capabilities of AI-driven weather forecasting.

Track 3 – EO Vision-Language Models

This track explores the potential of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) for EO. We aim to investigate how these models, which connect images and text, can help us interact with and understand satellite or aerial imagery in new ways. Participants will experiment with using language to query images, generate descriptions, and retrieve relevant EO data.

We will provide access to selected pre-trained VLMs and information about their basic capabilities, example EO image-text datasets for tasks like visual question answering and image captioning, as well as guidance on input data formats and access, starter Jupyter notebook with examples for common VLM tasks, useful libraries, and support from mentors familiar with VLMs and EO.

Evaluation and prizes

All tracks will be judged by a panel of experts who will assess submitted projects on a scale of 1 to 5 and based on effectiveness, efficiency, novelty, clarity, and impact potential.

ThinkingEarth will award cash prizes to the first three ranked participants: 2,500 EUR, 1,500 EUR and 1,000 EUR respectively.

Prizes will be awarded in accordance with Horizon Europe eligibility and financial rules (AMGA Article 6). All winners must comply with the Hackathon terms and conditions and may be asked to submit proof of eligibility (e.g., age, affiliation, country of residence). Cash prizes are intended to reward excellence in research and innovation and are subject to documentation of the selection process and evaluation results. ThinkingEarth reserves the right to adjust or substitute prizes where necessary to ensure compliance with Horizon Europe grant provisions.

Why Join?

Whether you are a student, researcher, developer, or EO expert, ThinkingEarth’s Hackathon is your chance to work with cutting-edge open assets, collaborate with like-minded innovators, build solutions that can have real impact, gain recognition, and win prizes for your ideas. You only need to bring your laptop!

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