Clemson University

School of Computing Seminar with Vidya Samadi, Clemson University Agricultural Sciences

Development of a National Scale Big Data Analytics Pipeline to Study the Potential Impacts of Flooding on Critical Infrastructures and Communities

Abstract:

With the rapid development of the Internet of Things (IoT) and Big data infrastructure, crowdsourcing techniques have emerged to facilitate data processing and problem solving particularly for flood emergency management. A Flood Analytics Information System (FAIS) has been developed as a Python web application to gather Big data from multiple servers and analyze flooding impacts during historical and real-time events. The application is smartly designed to integrate crowd intelligence, machine learning, and natural language processing of tweets to provide flood warning with the aim to improve situational awareness for flood risk management and decision making. FAIS allows the user to submit search request from the United States Geological Survey (USGS) as well as Twitter through a series of queries, which is used to modify request URL sent to data sources. This national scale prototype combines flood peak rates and river level information with geotagged tweets to identify a dynamic set of at-risk locations to flooding in real-time. The list of prioritized areas can be updated every 15 minutes as the crowdsourced data and environmental information and condition change. FAIS uses Google Vision API (application programming interface) and image processing algorithms to detect objects (flood, road, vehicle, river, vegetation, etc.) in time-lapse digital images and build valuable metadata into image catalog. In addition, the application performs Flood Frequency Analysis (FFA) and computes design flow values corresponding to specific return periods that can help engineers in designing safe structures and in protection against economic losses due to maintenance of civil infrastructure. FAIS is successfully tested in real-time during Hurricane Dorian flooding event as well as during historical events such as Hurricanes Matthew and Florence flooding across the Carolinas where the storm made extensive damage and disruption to critical infrastructure and the environment.

Bio:

Dr. Vidya Samadi is an Assistant Professor at Clemson Agricultural Sciences Department and directs Hydrosystem and Hydroinformatics Research (HHR) lab at SC Water Resources Center. Simultaneously, she is an affiliated researcher with the UofSC International Hazards and Vulnerability Research Institute. Dr. Samadi’ academic research focuses on hydroinformatics, Big data analytics, and flood computational modeling. Her industry research interest concentrates on Geographic Information System (GIS) software development, and GIS web/mobile application development. Research sponsors include the National Science Foundation (NSF), Savannah River National Lab, NOAA Sea Grant Consortium, and South Carolina Department of Transportation (SCDOT). Dr. Samadi has authored or co‐authored more than 45 journal articles and peer reviewed conference proceedings. Prior to joining Clemson University in January 2020, Dr. Samadi was a Research Assistant Professor at the UofSC Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) Department. Prior to that, she held three postdoctoral positions, respectively at the UofSC-CEE, a NOAA center for the Carolinas Integrated Sciences and Assessments (UofSC) as well as at Hydro-environmental Research Center (HRC), School of Engineering, Cardiff University, United Kingdom.  https://www.clemson.edu/cafls/faculty_staff/profiles/samadi

Host:

Nina Hubig, nhubig@clemson.edu

Friday, February 7, 2020 at 2:30pm to 3:30pm

McAdams Hall, 114
821 McMillan Rd., Clemson, SC 29634, USA

Notice of Non-Discrimination

Event Type

Lectures / Seminars / Speakers

Target Audience

Students, Faculty

Departments

College of Engineering, Computing and Applied Sciences, School of Computing, Research Seminars

Website

https://computing.clemson.edu/socsemi...

Contact Name:

Dida Weeks

Contact Phone:

8646565555

Contact Email:

didaw@clemson.edu

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