Building on the success of the first ESA/NASA Workshop hosted at ESA-ESRIN, the second workshop will be held May 19-22, 2026, hosted by NASA MSFC in Huntsville, Alabama. The workshop focuses on advancing AI foundation models for Earth observation, with emphasis on moving from rapid prototyping toward operational deployment. Key themes include designing foundation models that are accountable, scientifically validated, interoperable, computationally efficient, and integrated into downstream systems such as Digital Twins, dashboards, early warning systems, and edge/onboard applications. The workshop will address reproducibility, transparent benchmarking, scalable methods, domain knowledge integration, and the development of multimodal, physically grounded models with uncertainty quantification.
