Data science can improve efficiency across a broad range of applications—a concept that rings true in the scope of capstone projects at the 2024 Data-to-Knowledge (D2K Lab) Fall Showcase.
On December 4, 2024 in Rice University’s Duncan Hall, 11 interdisciplinary teams of students presented capstone projects sponsored by D2K Affiliate Members, with industries as diverse as energy, the arts, environmental conservation, spacecraft technology and more.
“A broad theme of this fall’s showcase is the impact of data science to improve efficiency by the clever and thoughtful use of data,” said Chad Shaw, director of D2K. “This fall’s showcase is also characterized by the diversity of projects and the new sponsors that worked with D2K for the first time.”
Chronic Outages won the top capstone prize by exploring the patterns of Houston’s annual power outages, using CenterPoint’s public outage data and the Social Vulnerability Index to identify disproportionately impacted communities in Houston. Sponsored by the Houston Chronicle and working with Chronicle data reporter Matt Zdun, the team’s data insights could help guide efficient intervention and lead to a more resilient and equitable energy infrastructure.
The Chronic Outages team members were Sejal Gupta, senior in economics; Shreya Challa, senior in mathematical economic analysis; Yuxin Yan and Jacob Lapp, master’s students in data science; Caroline Hashimoto, senior in civil engineering; and Daniel Zhao, master’s student in business. The team’s mentors included D2K Fellow Tyler Bagwell and faculty mentor Arko Barman.
Judges selected SeeBirds, sponsored by Texas A&M (TAMU) Corpus Christi and Audubon Texas, for the first runner-up award winner. Team members included Akshay Raj, Jason Nguyen, Will Miraglia Kaiyan (Kyle) Ma and Sirui Hao, and the team was mentored by D2K Fellow Krish Kabra and Arko Barman.
SeeBirds developed machine learning and computer vision models to complement TAMU’s and the Audubon Society’s shore bird aerial imagery of habitats along the Texas coastline. The teams’ models streamline the process of locating and labeling the waterbird nest locations providing a more efficient way to extract bird demographics over human annotation; ultimately these data provide valuable insights to the health of coastal ecosystems and indications of broader ecological changes.
The second runner-up prize went to the Operagoers, a project sponsored by the Houston Grand Opera (HGO) to improve their donor pipeline. Using survival analysis data models to analyze patron demographics and behavior, the Operagoers developed a system to optimize timing of patron engagements to convert opera-lovers to HGO donors. This enables more efficient, targeted outreach activity of the HGO organization.
Students in the Operagoers team included Gal Kadmon, Yurie Han, Amy Lam, Junyao Ren and Yi Pan. They were advised by D2K Fellow Janet Fu and faculty mentor Xinjie Lan.
The D2K Showcase plays an integral role at Rice Engineering and Computing because it connects students to real-world data science projects. “The D2K Lab drives our commitment to experiential, hands-on data science education,” said Luay Nakhleh, William and Stephanie Sick Dean, George R. Brown School of Engineering and Computing. “As our school continues to emphasize the importance of computing, the D2K Lab will become increasingly central to our academic mission.”