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UR-Linked

A searchable database, UR-Linked allows aspiring undergraduate researchers, scholars, and artists to connect with faculty mentors across campus. UR-Linked includes faculty profiles as well as more specific information about their research projects and artistic endeavors.


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Assessing rain gardens on campus by AI

    PROFESSOR - ZhiQiang Chen

    Contact Detail
    ZhiQiang Chen
    chenzhiq@umkc.edu
    8162351279


    Description

    In Engineering, visual assessment of infrastructure performance has been a typical practice. However, as one could imagine, it is time consuming and sometimes dangerous. Among many such tasks, visual assessment of rain gardens (which are many on campus and play critical roles in storm water management) is a representative one. Can machines replace us for doing this? Today, some artificial intelligence algorithms shed promise for a limited number of scene understanding problems. The golden rule is that computers have to start from somewhere or learn from existing captioned or labeled data (as known as training data). At Dr. Chen’s lab at UMKC, several smart apps with a cloud computing backend have been developed. Built atop of this, we are striving to build training data sets for training future machine learning algorithms that can assess rain gardens. Based on our smart apps, the training data sets will be automatically sent to the cloud. Further development is necessary for feeding these training data to an AI engine, which is, for example, Google’s cloud-based machine learning platform, TensorFlow.


    Location
    Kansas City


    Qualifications
    Programming in Java and Python, knowledge in MongoDB, and a keen interest in machine learning or image understanding.


    Logistics and Compensation
    Eligible for SEARCH or SUROP grant. Other research grants and financial support maybe available depending on the skills of students.


    Duites
    Programming, testing, and photographing on campus


    Last Updated
    Mar 24, 2016


Now that UR-Linked has helped you to identify a faculty project that interests you and for which you might be qualified, be sure to review the essential steps in contacting a potential faculty mentor.

The Director of Undergraduate Research, Dr. Jane Greer., can provide you with further guidance about finding and connecting with faculty mentors at UMKC.

Once you have reviewed the essential steps to prepare for connecting with a potential faculty mentor, you can use the "Contact Details" for this project to connect with the faculty member and to begin a conversation about how you might get involved.