News - NASA Langley Research Center
U.S. High School Student in 2021 SEES Intern Program Shares Experiences Using Mosquito Habitat Mapper
U.S. high school students participating in a collaboration effort between The Institute for Global Environmental Strategies (IGES) and the NASA Texas Space Grant Consortium (TSGC) to extend the TSGC Summer Enhancement in Earth Science (SEES) Internship program are sharing their research experiences using The GLOBE Program’s app, GLOBE Observer Mosquito Habitat Mapper (MHM) via GLOBE’s “Community Blog.”
In “SEES 2021 Earth System Explorer,” SEES MHM Intern, Nandini R., a student from Texas, USA, shares her experience. “Coming into the NASA SEES Internship, I had only ever experienced science through a one-dimensional lens. I always knew the results, experimenting just to prove existing knowledge. This internship taught me to look outside the box and challenge my preconceived notions to discover new relationships that exist on our Earth.”
“Through our weekly meetings, I got to interact with guest speakers and my mentors who were taking on various projects in the field of epidemiology. Inspired by one such meeting where Dr. Chellappan used machine learning to predict the mosquito species in an image, I wanted to explore the power of this tool. I started asking questions, intrigued by how the model used mathematical values to make sense of the pixels in the image.”
“My swarm of questions did not go unnoticed - fellow researcher Sriram Elango picked up on my interest in AI. He messaged me in the zoom chat and expressed his interest in doing a project with machine learning as well! We decided to research together, brainstorming ideas for our project.”
“We have finished our research paper outlining our process of data collection and presenting our model as a proof of concept. We are currently working on publishing our paper with the help of our amazing mentors and hope to share our findings with the scientific community. The NASA SEES Internship has taught me to explore and experiment without constraint. I have come to appreciate the game-changing work that NASA has done and hope to become a part of that change as I grow into a scientist in the future,” Nandini said in the blog.
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News origin: GLOBE Implementation Office