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Welcome to the ThinkingEarth Hackathon

Harnessing Copernicus Foundation Models to Decode Earth from Space

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under Grant Agreement No 101130544

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Consortium

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What is ThinkingEarth?

  • “Copernicus Foundation Models for a ThinkingEarth”
  • 3-year Horizon Europe project (Jan 2024 – Dec 2026)

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ThinkingEarth Use Cases

UC1: Distributed solar energy production forecasting and demand management

UC2a: Biodiversity monitoring in urban environment

UC2b: Forest biomass monitoring: carbon sink assessment for the carbon credit industry

UC3: Causal inference for food insecurity analysis

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Connect with us!

X: @ThinkingEarthEU

LinkedIn:

https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/thinkingearth/

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Subscribe to our newsletter:

https://thinking-earth.eu/

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ThinkingEarth Hackathon Tracks

  • Track 1: EO Foundation Models

🡪 Explore fine-tuning strategies, adapt models across geographies or modalities, identify limitations, develop novel use cases in tasks such as land cover classification or biomass estimation.

  • Track 2: Weather Forecasting Models

🡪 Assess model capabilities, design evaluation frameworks, or apply models to downstream tasks such as cyclone tracking or extreme weather event prediction.

  • Track 3: EO Vision-Language Models (VLMs)

🡪 Use pre-trained VLMs to interact with EO data through natural language. Experiment with image captioning, visual question answering, EO data retrieval, or text-based image search.

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Resources – GitHub

  • All resources you need to start are available in Devpost
  • GitHub with material for 3 tracks

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Ask the ThinkingEarth team for support

Track-specific questions? Ask the mentors

  • Thomas Dujardin, Technical University of Munich
  • Franziska Gerken, NVIDIA
  • Angelos Zavras, National Technical University of Athens

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General questions?

  • Esther Millet, Evenflow
  • Souzana Touloumtzi, National Observatory of Athens

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Do not forget to join the hackathon on Devpost

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What you are expected to submit

Create your project on Devpost:

    • Project title, brief description, motivation
    • The problem your project solves
    • How you built it
    • Any challenges your ran into
    • Lessons learnt & possible next steps
    • What you used to build it (e.g., pytorch, tensorboard, etc.)
    • Video (optional but highly recommended)
    • GitHub repo (mandatory)

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GitHub repo requirements

  • README.md
    • Short description (problem, approach, outcome)
    • Instructions to run the code
  • Project Documentation
    • Methodology (data, models, algorithms used)
    • Results (plots, metrics, qualitative insights)
    • Limitations (if any)
  • Code
    • Clear structure & reproducibility
  • Data & preprocessing steps
  • Requirements or environment with dependencies

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Evaluation criteria & prizes

  1. Effectiveness
  2. Efficiency
  3. Novelty
  4. Clarity
  5. Impact potential

Only projects submitted by BiDS25 participants are eligible for evaluation and prizes!

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What to include in your pitch presentation

  • Individual/team name, project title & relevant thematic track
  • Brief description of your project & motivation
  • What is innovative about your project – potential impact
  • Clear description of methodology & how you built your solution: data, models/algorithms, coding tools used
  • Challenges/limitations you ran into
  • Any results you produced (plots, metrics, qualitative insights)

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Judges

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Enjoy the hackathon!

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under Grant Agreement No 101130544