Support
Over the summer, I was lucky enough to work with Professor Lisa Torrey building a machine learning model to identify growth of invasive water chestnut around St. Lawrence county using drone imagery. We worked alongside biology Professor Brad Baldwin, leader of the ongoing Water Chestnut Project (https://sites.stlawu.edu/brad-baldwin/water-chestnut-project/), which aims to study and fight the growth of this invasive species in the rivers and lakes surrounding SLU.
My main responsibility was spearheading the logistics and development of a computational tool that could assist in identifying areas of new growth on the water. This included going into the field with Brad and his intern, determining ideal data collection methods and neural network parameters, and testing and improving network iterations.
Can you spot the invasive growth above? The floating vegetation to the right of the roadway is water chestnut, while that to the right is native.
Overall, I learned how to design a neural network, determine ideal data processing and augmentation choices, and most importantly how to communicate across disciplines and areas of expertise about technological capabilities, limitations, and functionality. This internship gave me the opportunity to lead the implementation of a machine learning model for a practical, community-level issue, and inspired my desire to work on technology and data in local, community contexts.