Undergraduate students Anika Cruz and Chenxi Zhu are completing an exciting internship with an Artificial Intelligence project at the SimCenter this Fall semester. Their project ties into the SimCenter’s BRAILS software with an objective of using deep learning to train an image classification model to identify building attributes or features. These models could be used to enhance data for buildings in large regional hazard simulations. Chenxi and Anika started by annotating more than a thousand images to support the project objective. This will enable the building inventory data to be beneficial to civil engineers, planners, and policy makers.

Anika Cruz is a junior undergraduate student at UC Berkeley studying Data Science with an emphasis in Cognition. Chenxi Zhu is a fourth-year undergraduate majoring in Data Science with an interest in city planning and urban data. She reflects that "it has been a great experience working on this team and lots of fun to analyze data outside of the college bubble. I have learned a lot throughout this process: from productive collaboration between team members to getting my hands dirty with image data processing and analysis. And I feel honored to be a part of the bigger picture and looking forward to applying our work to natural hazard simulations."

The interns’ experience enabled them to understand how data can be applied to a real-world project. Due to global COVID-19 restrictions, they have been working remotely under the guidance of Charles Wang of the SimCenter development team, and Matt Schoettler, SimCenter Associate Director.

The internship was made possible by UC Berkeley's Data Science Discovery Program that brings together multidisciplinary teams for cutting-edge data research.