Geospatial Foundation Models (GFMs) are rapidly reshaping how we extract meaning from Earth observation, maps, trajectories, and multimodal geospatial data. The space is moving fast—often in parallel across academia, startups, and industry—which makes collaboration unusually valuable right now.
CARTO and the Barcelona Supercomputing Center are hosting a one-day workshop in Barcelona to gather a small group of people actively building or researching foundation models for geospatial problems. The goal is to share what’s real, what’s working, and what’s missing—then create space for candid discussion and potential collaboration.
What to expect
- Lightning talks + short technical talks from invited participants
- Discussion-oriented sessions (less “conference”, more “working room”)
- Time for collaboration: shared challenges, benchmarks, datasets, eval, deployment patterns
- A community-first vibe: pragmatic, technical, and honest
Who this is for
- Research groups working on GFMs EO foundation models geospatial VLMs
- Startups building foundational geospatial AI (EO, mobility, mapping, risk, climate, etc.)
- Applied teams at labs or companies pushing the frontier (modeling, eval, infra, products)
Topics we would like to cover
- Model families: EO transformers, multimodal geo-VLMs, geo-LLMs, time-series / trajectories
- Pretraining strategies: self-supervised, contrastive, masked modeling, alignment
- Data: open datasets, licensing constraints, labeling, metadata, provenance
- Evaluation: benchmarks, robustness, generalization, temporal drift
- Tooling & infra: tiling, indexing, retrieval, vector/raster pipelines, deployment
- Interop & formats: GeoParquet, STAC, Zarr/COGs, cloud-native patterns
- What “foundation” should mean in geospatial: tasks, modalities, scales, ethics
Event details
Date: February 04, 2026
Time: 9:30h to 17:30h (Madrid, CTE),
Location: Hybrid | Via Laietana, 26, Ciutat Vella, 08003 Barcelona
Language: English
Participation
This is a curated / capacity-limited workshop to keep discussion high-quality.
Request an invite via registration—include what you’re working on and what you’d like to contribute. If you dont provide information we will not be able to acomodate you.
🔗 View full programme & register
We will likely record the session for dissemination purposes and will be possible join virtually.
