Harnessing Copernicus Foundation Models to Decode Earth from Space

About the challenge The ThinkingEarth Hackathon at Big Data from Space (BiDS) 2025, invites AI and Earth observation enthusiasts to explore the power of Copernicus-scale foundation models. Organised by the Horizon Europe project ThinkingEarth, this challenge gives participants hands-on access to state-of-the-art resources including Earth Observation (EO) foundation models, graph-based weather forecasting tools, and vision-language models for satellite data. Participants will work on one of three open-ended tracks:

EO Foundation Models: fine-tune and adapt large models for geospatial tasks

Weather Forecasting: evaluate and extend AI-based weather models

Vision-Language Models for EO: connect imagery and text to enhance EO data interpretation

Over a three-week remote development phase and a final onsite sprint at BiDS25, teams will prototype solutions, receive expert mentoring, and compete for prizes. The challenge is open to individuals and small teams with strong skills in deep learning and data science. No prior EO experience is required—just curiosity, creativity, and a drive to innovate. A webinar was organised on September 3rd at 10:00 AM CEST to walk participants through the tracks, tools, and participation process. You can watch the recording of the webinar here: https://youtu.be/Bmtw8U-acfQ  Get started To help you get started we provide a GitHub page with the following material:

Access to Earth Observation foundation models (e.g., CopernicusFM, DOFA)

Pre-trained weather forecasting and vision-language models

Example EO datasets and downstream task descriptions (e.g., land cover classification, cyclone tracking, image captioning)

Starter notebooks with example code for each track

Access all the necessary resources here: https://thinkingearth-hackathon.devpost.com/resources To participate, you’ll need to have coding experience in Python and deep learning libraries such as PyTorch and NumPy. You can run your solutions locally or use cloud-based environments like Colab or AWS. Submission steps
Create your project on Devpost using the platform's template
Develop your solution remotely until September 28th
Bring your laptop and finalise your project during the final coding sprint at BiDS'25 in Riga
Submit your project on September 29th by 17:00 local time

Sept. 1, 2025 - Sept. 29, 2025

National Technical University of Athens

Jelgavas iela 1, Zemgales priekšpilsēta, Rīga, LV-1004, Latvia

€5,000