The New Light Technologies, a GIS and IT services company based in DC, has posted some wonderful internship opportunities. Please e-mail the contacts listed below if you are interested!
Disaster Imagery Analysis
Contact: Madeline Jones madeline.jones@nltgis.com
Project idea that would be good for an upper level student with a GIS and Remote Sensing background as well as an interest in natural disasters. Through our work with FEMA, we have a lot of pre- and post- hurricane imagery over Puerto Rico from Hurricane Maria and I would love to have some help developing a geoprocessing workflow for detecting debris in roads and near homes to guide search & rescue/disaster response teams following major hurricanes (or other wind/flood-related disasters). I would eventually script up and automate this workflow on a larger scale to use for future disasters, but it would be great to have someone focus full time on the research and development piece of the workflow with some sample imagery from the recent crazy hurricane season. If they have experience in Python that's a bonus but not necessary. The student would be able to use ENVI or ArcMap or any other common or open source imagery software they are already comfortable with.
Vector Tiles and/or Hazard Modeling
Contact: Brad Bottoms brad.bottoms@nltgis.com
Looking for someone who can work with implementing vector tiles in our humanitarian mapping platform. What they would be doing is taking services that we are already generating in JSON and converting those to vector tiles in our AWS environment. Taking some time to come up with the most efficient specification for dissemination. Vector tiles are becoming the standard for visualization of geospatial data in web maps and every year tons of people present on them at conferences such as FOSS4g so it would be a fantastic opportunity for a student to get exposure and have materials to present on. The intern would also be exposed to a team of emergency management GIS professionals who have worked on many disasters such as Maria, Harvey, Nepal, and many more.
Other needs include assistance in doing research on shelter and commodity needs for people affected by disasters. We do hazard modeling to determine the percent chance of someone needing assistance based on the level of exposure then apply some planning factors to that to determine how many people need shelter and how much food and water to send. We are looking to modify some existing standards and refine the methods. This task would require someone that either has heavy environmental modeling desire for the hazard modeling or someone who has a more human geography hope for their career to assist in the socio-economic commodity needs analysis. We are currently working on the problem so either would be of assistance and will certainly produce research-grade papers if we can't find a development-oriented student for the vector tile initiative.
