Time and duration

The Reaching new heights with GeoFM Challenge is implemented by the ESA Φ-lab and the International Telecommunication Union and AI For Good, as well as the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, the Group on Earth Observations (GEO) and Politecnico di Milano. It will take place online from 8^th April 2026 to 30^th June 2026. Final submissions must be made latest by 23:59 CEST (Central European Summer Time) after which the submission system will be closed.  Please note that no submissions can be accepted after closing the Challenge on this date and time.

Participants

Participants from all over the world can participate in the challenge. You must be of legal age in your jurisdiction to participate. Please also carefully read the instructions below regarding your eligibility of receiving a cash prize.

Teams

Each participating team must designate a team leader, who will serve as the primary point of contact between the organisers and the team. Please note that, due to rules related to the payout of cash prizes and reimbursements, the team leader should be of legal age corresponding to his/her jurisdiction but at least 18 years old.

Participants are only allowed to join one team throughout the duration of the Challenge. Teams are not permitted to create duplicate or secondary entries. To ensure fairness and transparency, we kindly ask that participants from the same public organisation or private company form a single team.

If multiple teams from the same entity appear to be collaborating, the ESA Φ-lab Challenge organisers reserve the right to require them to merge into one team. This rule is in place to prevent unfair advantages and maintain a level playing field for all. If you are planning to join the Challenge with colleagues from your workplace or academic institution, please coordinate and register as one unified team per entity.

Note: In the case of large institutions (e.g., universities), it may not be feasible for all individuals to coordinate. If teams can demonstrate they are not cooperating, they may be exempt from this rule.

The organizing team reserves the right to decide on a case-by-case basis and to request the deletion of any duplicate registrations or submissions.

Creating and submitting a solution

For the challenge, you have access to the training and test datasets and a range of tools in the form of a Jupyter Notebook (Starter Pack). All usable data is hosted on the Earth Observation Training Data Lab, EOTDL. For direct access to the dataset please click here:

EOTDL

Please note that the Jupyter Notebook is included in the dataset. No other datasets might be used for the development of your solution. However, pre-trained models are allowed.

A public leaderboard lets you see and compare your current points in relation to other teams’ submissions. A private leaderboard will be disclosed at the end of the competition, to be used for the final ranking.

To avoid overload and unfair behaviours, participants are allowed to upload their solutions every 12 hours. The final submission of your solution must be uploaded latest by 30^th June 2026 at 23:59 CEST / 11:59 PM CEST. Please be aware that upload might take a few minutes. We can not accept any manual submissions e.g. by mail if you fail to meet this deadline. In case of a technical error outside of your  responsibility please contact our support team via hello@ai4eo.eu. Each valid submission must consist of the predictions (RFI bounding boxes), over all test examples. For more details on the submission format, see the Jupyter notebook (Starter Pack).

Challenge evaluation and reproducibility check

The scoring of submitted solutions is performed directly by the platform. A public leaderboard lets you see and compare your current points in relation to other teams’ submissions. A private leaderboard will be disclosed at the end of the competition, to be used for the final ranking.

Once the challenge has been closed, we will ask the top-performing teams (up to 10), with the highest scores over the entire test set, to submit their methods for a reproducibility check. In this phase, the organisers will verify the reproducibility of the methods developed by the participants of the GeoAI Challenge.

Please note that, if the solution turns out to be not reproducible, or if any concerns about its validity arises, the organisers reserve the right to contact the team leader of the corresponding team to resolve such issues. If the issues cannot be resolved, the team will not be eligible to receive prizes and might be expelled from further participation.

For more details on the metrics and leaderboard, see the Metrics and Leaderboard sections on the Data page.

Solution presentation

The winners of the GeoAI Challenge will be publicly awarded during the AI for Good Global Summit 2026 from 07 to 10 July 2026 in Geneva, Switzerland. To offer the winners the chance to present their great solutions and to ensure full transparency of the products, the winning teams are expected to present their respective solutions in a pitch-style manner of ca. 10 minutes per team with the use of a short pitch-deck (for example in the form of a PowerPoint presentation).

Participation will be expected online, if possible for the participants, they also have the opportunity to join physically. For this, we are able to reimburse up to 500 EUR per team (not per individual!) for travel and accommodation costs.

Payout of cash prize

All prize money and reimbursements will be transferred to the point of contact of the respective Team. The point of contact and the Teams are responsible for fair and equal distribution of the prize money between all team members, or choosing the further use of the money. The organizers will not interfere with any potential dispute on these matters and cannot offer legal or arbitrary assistance.

In order to receive a cash prize you must be of legal age in your jurisdiction but at least 18 years old. You must be holding a bank account which is capable of receiving normal international bank transfers via IBAN and BIC/SWIFT code. The organising team is not responsible for failed transfers due to wrong account information.

Novaspace will be handling the cash prize transaction from ESA side in EUR whilst the International Telecommunication Union will handle the payout of CHF.