2020 'Ike Wai Data Science Summer Research Program

Project Description: Long-term monitoring of coral reefs has shown that certain species exhibit higher resilience to stressors and disturbances than others. This variability in survivorship has led scientists to investigate which coral characteristics lead to a certain species being a ‘winner’ or a ‘loser’ on a coral reef in the face of disturbance. This research experience project will use data science tools, including computer vision and statistical modeling, to determine the 3D morphological characteristics associated with coral resilience among long-term monitoring sites in the Hawaiian Archipelago.
Preferred Pre-Requisite Skills: Experience with R coding software. Ability to snorkel.

Project Description: The research project aims to increase understanding of Hawaiian island hydrology through text analytics to provide valuable insights to decision-makers. This project addresses the challenges of supplying sustainable freshwater, dealing with climate variability and increasing population demands, and water contamination. The project involves a sequence of activities such as transcribing Hawaiian articles using optical character recognition (OCR), translating Hawaiian documents using machine translation, and analyzing them using text analytics tools to extract meaningful information for decision-making.

Preferred Pre-Requisite Skills: Experience with any programming language, preferably Python.