Grace Liu ’23, Computer Science

Grace Liu ’23

Major

Computer Science

Project Title

Data-intensive Analysis of the Climate-Water Crisis in India

Presentation Link

View Grace's Presentation

Certificate(s): Statistics and Machine Learning, Language and Culture

I worked with two other interns investigating whether villages in India with greater water scarcity have higher rates of micro-irrigation systems — such as drip irrigation and sprinkler irrigation — which are more water efficient than traditional canal and flood systems. The first couple of weeks consisted of cleaning and merging data from India’s demographic census and India’s Minor Irrigation Census with remotely sensed data for the analysis. Then we performed exploratory analyses to find patterns in the data, using the enhanced vegetation index and the percentage of wells not in use as an indicator of water scarcity. I focused on mapping the explanatory and outcome variables using the program GeoPandas so we could get a better sense of their spatial distribution. The meat of our analysis consisted of using regression techniques in the R programming language to quantify the impact of our water-scarcity proxies on the percentage of drip and/or sprinkler irrigation systems in a village. Overall, this project helped me learn how to collaborate with other students and focus on our individual strengths, while still challenging myself to develop new technical abilities.