SMART FIRES RII Track-1 Project

On a beautiful fall day in September, a team of Montana NSF EPSCoR researchers, students and outreach professionals from several Montana colleges and universities gathered at the University of Montana’s Lubrecht Experimental Forest near Greenough, Mont. to view prescribed fire experimental plots while also considering how citizens and communities can contribute to statewide research.

All participants in the EPSCoR All-Hands Meeting on Sept. 16-17, 2024 are invited to participate in citizen science investigation using a free app supported by NASA that allows volunteers to learn more about our shared environment by taking observations of the land, clouds, trees and mosquito habitat.We will use the app, called GLOBE Observer, during our trip to the Lubrecht Experimental Forest on Tuesday, Sept. 17.

What is your specialty? I am a computational cognitive neuroscientist. I’m really interested in brain network dynamics and larger systems that relate to patients where you can pick out biomarkers that are similar across patients to help diagnoses.

What is your specialty? I work in the space between statistics and machine learning.Statistical models are nice because they’re interpretable, probabilistic, and reliable to train. But they can struggle with large, complex datasets. On the other hand, machine learning models are great for large, complex datasets, but many of them are black boxes which are hard to interpret, and the training process can be unreliable and resource intensive. My research is about developing new methods which blend the best of these worlds. 

Each year, the Science Math Resource Center at MSU co-hosts the STEM Summer Institute, an annual conference for over 170 K-12 educators from around the state. This summer, SMRC led a workshop that introduced educators to the SMART FIRES project and included presentations by Dr. Kevin Repasky from the Smart Optical Sensor thrust and Will Jardee from the Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning thrust.