Outreach
Mentorship, Recruitment, and Engagement
Our investment in our local communities, advancing education and awareness of science careers and pathways.
Community Outreach
Automatically detecting road conditions in rainy, snowy, and low visibility weather
#CODE_IT Middle School STEM Camp
Detecting and classifying precipitation type for improving weather forecasts
Undergraduate Research
Low cost visibility measurements for improving state-wide transportation safety
Community Outreach
Our Texas A&M – Corpus Christi and Del Mar College (DMC) partners participate in the annual Discovery Day at DMC, bringing in 700-900 middle and high schools for STEM awareness. There they present their work including a demonstration of UAS and GIS technologies. Our DMC partners participate in other local, science-education recruitment events, such as Bay Day/Earth Day and the Hurricane Conference.
Spanish outreach:
- NSF AI2ES PhD student Marina Vicens-Miquel and fellow PhD student at the TAMU-CC Conrad Blucher Institute Isabel Garcia gave a TV interview (KRIS 6 News) on the topic “Hispanic women leading the way in STEM”
- MyRadar is developing multiple NSF AI2ES spanish-language videos for the general public to be deployed in their app
Women in STEM:
- Members of NSF AI2ES hosted a panel discussion at the 21st Conference on Artificial Intelligence for Environmental Science entitled “Women in AI: A Panel Celebrating the Pioneering Work of Women in the Field of Environmental Artificial Intelligence”.
Additional Outreach:
- Partnered with American Meteorological Society for their teacher training
- Meetings were held to discuss potential collaborative educational opportunities with NOAA and with the AMS Education Programs.
- The TAMU-CC NSF AI2ES team was highlighted as part of the 2022 TAMU-CC Research week through a panel entitled “Pioneering Coastal Artificial Intelligence”
“If you love what you do, there is nothing that will stop you.”
– Marina Vicens Miquel, Postdoctoral Scholar
#CODE_IT Middle School STEM Camp
We hold an annual, two week Summer Code Camp, #Code_IT Camp at Del Mar Community College. Every year we host 30+ middle school students from the greater Corpus Christi, Texas area to engage with coding and STEM topics. The camp offers several levels of coding curriculum focused on spatial reasoning and computer programming, logic-based programming, and text-based coding for drones. NSF AI2ES researchers and graduate students give technical presentations on their research and hold panel informational sessions, bringing a greater awareness of science careers to the campers.
Every year we hold new activities from coding online tools, to designing interactive robot behavior, including programming small drones!
Student team work together towards the final project on the last day, where they can demonstrate the topics they have learned throughout the week. Each camper takes home a mBot Neo robot they individually built and coded to continue their STEM education. Team centric approach allowed campers to improve on their technical, communication and leadership skills as they worked as a team to achieve camp objectives.
We often get return campers! Prior year campers are invited to participate as volunteers, mentoring and assisting in instruction.
Undergraduate Research
TAMU-CC has hired a total of 33 undergraduate research assistants (URAs) over the first four years of NSF AI2ES. The students help with different phases of the research and also assist in the development of the DMC educational award classes.
Three DMC undergraduates were hired through TAMU-CC but worked with DMC faculty to help with the AI curriculum development. Two of them have graduated with the new GeoAI certificate and one continues to assist with the new program.
Every year, the University of Oklahoma (OU) partners with the National Weather Center (NWC) REU program, a successful long-running REU program already in place at OU. They help to provide career development and training while we provide the funds and people to mentor additional students. Most summers we hire 2-3 undergraduates for this program.
NSF NCAR MILES routinely hosts interns through the SIParCS program.
Past NSF NCAR/NSF AI2ES projects included:
- explainable AI and uncertainty analysis for our machine learning winter precipitation type project.
- evaluation of predictions from the NCAR MILES CREDIT AI NWP system.
- geospatial data analysis and visualization of our ML precipitation type hindcasts.
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