# Tessera at CVPR 2026, and the front page of the European Space Agency! *2026-06-07 — note* It's continued to be a wild week for [TESSERA](https://anil.recoil.org/projects/tessera) in the news. [Jovana Knezevic](https://www.linkedin.com/in/jovana-knezevic/) is at [CVPR2026](https://cvpr.thecvf.com/) in Denver presenting our foundation [model paper](https://anil.recoil.org/papers/2025-tessera) right [now](https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7469428267544985602/) (poster \#578 from 11:45am to 1:45pm). We also ended up on the front page of the [European Space Agency](https://www.esa.int/Applications/Observing_the_Earth/Copernicus/Tessera_AI_model_offers_accessible_way_to_view_Earth) in the same week. Teenage me wouldn't have believed this possible!\! ## CVPR 2026 in Denver Jovana is over in Denver this week presenting [our work](https://geotessera.org/blog/2026-06-04-cvpr-earth-intelligence) at CVPR. It's an interesting room for us to be in as TESSERA is a bit distinct from the other models by being a pixel-wise, temporal model that compresses years of Sentinel‑1 radar and Sentinel‑2 optical data into [10m embeddings](https://anil.recoil.org/notes/tessera-embeddings-convention). This is distinct from other models that train on bigger spatial patches, and is (we think) a simpler and more focussed way of extracting high quality embeddings from noisy earth observation data. If you're at CVPR, please go and say hi to Jovana\!

Jovana Knezevic presents Tessera poster at CVPR26

## The hedgehog story keeps trotting on Meanwhile back in the UK, the [BBC hedgehog piece](https://anil.recoil.org/notes/hedgehog-tessera-week) made it onto the national breakfast news, which resulted in a barrage of text messages asking me why I was suddenly obsessed with hedgehogs and if I am ok.

I am pleased to report that I am perfectly ok except for now going on 5am runs looking for hedgehog habitats around Cambrideshire, but I think this is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. The [TVEyes monitoring service](https://tveyes.com) that the [University comms office](https://www.communications.cam.ac.uk/) uses keeps pinging with regional rebroadcasts. I am very much struck by how much mileage the "biodiversity angle" gets compared to the climate-change framing that's more doom-and-gloom... ## ESA puts us on the Copernicus front page I was absolutely gobsmacked to see the [European Space Agency had written up TESSERA](https://www.esa.int/Applications/Observing_the_Earth/Copernicus/Tessera_AI_model_offers_accessible_way_to_view_Earth) on their homepage: > "Foundation models are the new frontier of AI applied to remote-sensing data." > \-- [Nuno Miranda, ESA's Sentinel-1 Mission Manager](https://www.esa.int/Applications/Observing_the_Earth/Copernicus/Tessera_AI_model_offers_accessible_way_to_view_Earth), 2026 The ESA piece (along with the [phys.org](https://phys.org/news/2026-06-tessera-ai-accessible-view-earth.html) and [Cambridge coverage](https://www.cst.cam.ac.uk/research/eeg/cambridge-ai-tool-promises-new-era-earth-intelligence-space)) spends a lot of time on accessibility aspects, which is the bit I care about most. A researcher with a laptop can pull TESSERA embeddings for an arbitrary 10m patch of Earth without needing a GPU cluster (or indeed any registration at all), which opens up real Earth observation work to a much wider set of ecology and conservation groups who'd otherwise be priced out. For the hero picture accompanying the ESA piece, I grabbed a screenshot of ESA's own Paris HQ from the [TZE Explorer](https://tze.geotessera.org). You can do this yourself using either [TZE](https://tze.geotessera.org) or [TEE](https://tee.cl.cam.ac.uk) or even lash up a script yourself using [geotessera](https://pypi.org/project/geotessera/).

A day later, [Orbital Today](https://orbitaltoday.com/2026/06/05/meet-tessera-the-ai-turning-satellite-images-into-earths-fingerprints/) ran a piece with a good summary as well and also latched onto the 'fingerprint' term that[Sadiq Jaffer](https://toao.com) came up with for his [Pint of Science](https://anil.recoil.org/notes/2026w21)" talk. Coining a good phrase really does pay off; it's all 'fingerprints' and 'digihogs' now\! Synopsis: TESSERA gets its CVPR debut in Denver, the BBC hedgehog story trots on into national news, and the European Space Agency puts our model on their homepage! Words: 507 Discussion: - Bluesky: - Twitter: ## Related - [BBC UK: Saving Hedgehogs from Space](https://anil.recoil.org/videos/a75a5401-654e-4acf-87ec-b5285559a9a2) (video, 2026-06-07) - [.plan-26-21: Pint of Science, OxCaml dissertations, and TESSERA 1.1 stirring](https://anil.recoil.org/notes/2026w21) (note, 2026-05-24) - [What happens when a hedgehog story prickles its way into the BBC](https://anil.recoil.org/notes/hedgehog-tessera-week) (note, 2026-05-22) - [TESSERA now supports the Zarr geo-embeddings convention proposal](https://anil.recoil.org/notes/tessera-embeddings-convention) (note, 2026-03-27) - [TESSERA: Temporal Embeddings of Surface Spectra for Earth Representation and Analysis](https://anil.recoil.org/papers/2025-tessera) (paper, 2025-11-01) - [TESSERA, a pixelwise geospatial foundation model](https://anil.recoil.org/projects/tessera) (project, 2025-01-01) --- Canonical: https://anil.recoil.org/notes/cvpr-tessera-esa Type: note Tags: tessera, biodiversity, communications, spatial, ai