Improving drought resilience in East Africa with sensors, satellites and machine learning
Special Issues of Sustainability
PROJECTS
Instrumentation to Reduce Drought Emergencies
Using satellite and cellular connected sensors we are presently monitoring the water supplies of over a million people in arid Kenya and Ethiopia, expanding to over five million in 2018 and linking this data to regional water service providers and national policy makers in an effort to improve water services and drought resilience.
Infrastructure Resilience and Disaster Recovery
Despite efforts to improve community resilience to disasters, over the past 25 years the number and economic impact of natural disasters has increased each year. At the same time, little research has been done to evaluate the pre-disaster conditions that enable community recovery afterwards.
Associate Professor Amy Javernick-Will and her students focus on this increasingly vital aspect of community development.
Engineering Education
Assessing engineering students' understanding of social responsibility from undergraduate and graduate education into professional life.
In this NSF-funded study, quantitative and qualitative methods are used to understand how engineering and social responsibility are connected and valued by students at various stages of their college career, employees in the engineering workforce, and employers at engineering firms.
Green Energy
Alan Mickelson’s research group's efforts in Haiti have focused on training of local youth to install and maintain solar energy systems.
The curriculum was a hands-on one that involved constructing and reconfiguring a 2 kW solar system whose parts had been supplied by Alan’s team with funding from IEEE and the Mortenson Center.