Shashank Konduri wins 1st Place Poster Presentation at American Meteorological Society’s 100th Annual Meeting
Shashank Konduri from Northeastern University’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering received the 1st Place Poster Presentation Award at the American Meteorological Society’s 100th Annual Meeting held in Boston on January 11-12, 2020. The award was conferred for his inventive research on “In-season crop mapping for the continental United States“.
Konduri is an interdisciplinary PhD student advised by Professor Auroop Ganguly in the Sustainability and Data Sciences Lab. His research focuses on the climate impacts of food production. He is interested in building sophisticated data analysis tools to improve predictive insights into extreme climate.
Konduri’s presentation at the AMS 100th Annual Meeting explored mapping the spatial distribution of crops in a reasonable timeframe. Konduri collaborated with the US Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and the USDA’s Forest Service on his research, using data science for crop mapping at 8-day intervals during the growing season. “This research, which uses data sciences for crop mapping based on remote sensing, represents a significant research advance with direct implications to US agriculture and outperforms current methods used by the USDA,” said Ganguly. Konduri’s work will help farmers and industry better understand crop health in real-time.
Future objectives of the research include applying advanced machine learning algorithms that can increase the crop classification accuracy.