Data science students develop solutions for real-world problems

Data Science for the Common Good, a summer program operated by the UMass Amherst Center for Data Science, trains aspiring data scientists to work on real-world problems that benefit the common good. This year, Chhandak Bagchi and Gizem Cicekli, computer science graduate students at the Robert and Donna Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences, spent 12 weeks researching and developing a tool to automatically estimate the size of a whale from an aerial image. Working with partners from the UMass Amherst Biology Department, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and Aarhus University, they developed a prototype that, once validated, may be deployed on marine research ships to process whale images taken from drones in real time. Learn more.