Advancing Earth Intelligence
From October 19 to 21, 2026, BIFOLD and the European Space Agency’s Φ-lab hosted the Agentic AI for Earth Observation Workshop at the Langenbeck-Virchow-Haus in Berlin. Around 450 researchers, practitioners, and decision-makers from artificial intelligence, geospatial analytics, climate and weather science, remote sensing, and space mission operations discussed how agentic AI, meaning autonomous systems that can reason, plan, and collaborate with humans and other agents, can change the way satellite data is acquired, processed, and used.
What lies ahead on the road from Earth observation to Earth intelligence?
This question ran through all three days and raised many more. Seven keynote speakers set the stage: Christopher Forrest Brown (Google DeepMind), Steve Chien (Jet Propulsion Laboratory, NASA), Davide Crapis (Ethereum Foundation), Salman Khan (Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence), James Zou (Stanford University), and Jacopo Chevallard (Mistral AI). Participants shared and discussed their questions in talks, panels, poster presentations, and demos, as well as during the get-togethers. Here are a few of the challenges discussed at the workshop.
Hackathon
On October 22, a one-day hackathon followed the workshop program. Its motto was “Build-once, run-anywhere.” Teams of EO scientists, AI engineers, and early-career researchers turned Earth Observation services into tools that AI agents can call. They then combined these tools into working use cases. The results were shared through EVE’s official tool registry. EVE is a large language model that summarises, translates, and presents huge amounts of Earth Applications. This public, community-driven registry is backed by ESA Φ-lab.
Thanks for joining us in Berlin
The workshop was chaired by Prof. Dr. Begüm Demir, Deputy Director of BIFOLD, and Nicolas Longépé, EO Data Scientist at the Φ-lab Explore Office of ESA. BIFOLD thanks all speakers, participants, and the team at ESA Φ-lab for three inspiring days in Berlin.
Workshop website
Below is a selection of photos from the workshop days.
Photos: BIFOLD / Michael Setzpfandt
