Roshan Taneja and Yuvraj Taneja Won the NeurIPS High School Award
Congratulations to two of Spatial Data Lab interns, Roshan Taneja and Yuvraj Taneja, on their NeurIPS High School Award at one of the most prestigious conferences in the domain of AI (4 out of 355 submissions) : https://blog.neurips.cc/2024/11/18/announcing-the-neurips-high-school-projects-results/. Both Roshan Taneja and Yuvraj Taneja are students from Sacred Heart Prep high school at Atherton, California. Professor Siqing Wang at USC is the mentor of this intern project.
Project title: Image Classification on Satellite Imagery For Sustainable Rainwater Harvesting Placement in Indigenous Communities of Northern TanzaniaIn the remote regions of Northern Tanzania, women and children of the Maasai Tribe walk nine hours a day to collect water. Over four years, collaborative efforts with the Maasai communities have led to the installation of water harvesting units, enhancing the local socio-economic conditions by facilitating educational opportunities and economic pursuits for over 4,000 individuals. This project is a novel approach to integrating satellite data and image classification to identify densely populated areas marked by uniquely shaped Maasai homes. It will also use density maps to plan the best placement of rainwater harvesting units to help 30,000 Maasai. The backbone of this project was developing an image classification model trained on 10,000 hand-selected satellite image samples of Bomas (Maasai living units). This model generated a density heat map, enabling strategically placing rainwater harvesting units in the most critical locations to maximize impact. The project underscores the use of satellite technology and machine learning to address humanitarian needs such as water, particularly in harder-to-reach areas with no infrastructure.
