Posts

Abstract ** This article has been featured in Towards Data Science.** Being able to predict crop yields can have big and wide impact, for example related businesses can use this model to optimize their price and inventory, government can prepare for food shortage, even farmers can be informed of appropriate selling price if they know the regional yields. Here we show that one could predict the yield using satellite images using corn as an example crop. [Read More]

Abstract Inspiration: In an aging society, Medicare has becoming increasingly vital. Unfortunately, with modern US Healthcare programs’ complexity and sophistication, fraud losses in healthcare cost US taxpayers a staggering amount, to quote from the Justice Department, "Health care fraud costs the United States tens of billions of dollars each year. Some estimates put the figure close to $100 billion a year. It is a rising threat, with national health care expenditures estimated to exceed $3 trillion in 2014. [Read More]

Inspiration: There’s no denial that data manipulation on social media play has a huge impact on the society. The ability to target a group of people, to generate information so easily, and to know what those people want to hear is a dangerous tool that should be kept in check. Fake news are so wide spread today and people perception could be easily affected by it. Take this headline from The Hill as an example [Read More]

Inspiration: Solid Oxide Fuel Cells (SOFC) operates at more than 600 °C with both very oxidative and reductive environment. This makes it extremely hard to find a material that can seal SOFC. Screening of materials experimentally takes very long time. Here we employed theoretical approach and developed a descriptor that would allow us to quickly screen for materials that will “wet” the SOFC walls (and hence upon cooling it can form a seal), and will be stable in both environment. [Read More]

Inspiration: Ever wonder why woods are brown? Well that’s because of the polymer in them called lignin. In the next generation biofuels, chemicals and fuels are extracted from non-food biomass like poplar, switchgrass, etc. However, unlike corn, these biomass contain a polymer called lignin which inhibits accessibility of chemicals/enzymes to get into the to-be sugar source. These wood are currently treated chemically to removed lignin, from which the lignin is simply burnt for energy purposes. [Read More]