HotPopRobot

Artash Nath and Arushi Nath

On 29 August 2020, we delivered an online workshop for students from schools and colleges on space, artificial intelligence and big data. The workshop was organised by Nova77 who are the organisers of SpaceApps Vegas. It was attended by 25 students. The recording of the webinar is available online at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=sSv4NTZIMIw&feature=emb_logo

During the workshop we talk about our NASA SpaceApps COVID19 Global Winning project “The Masked Scales” project. The project measures the impact of the COVID19 lockdown using homemade instrument, live video analysis using machine learning and NASA space data, and converts it into a musical using multiple instruments such as flute, piano, vibraphone and marimba.

We talked about how we handled big data that was created from measurements of changes in our environment over three weeks. In addition to the numerical data, we ended with large amount of image data from the the live analysis of live videos. We handled these big data using Python and intensive image processing algorithms.

We went over each step of our project including where we got the idea of the project, how we built it up using materials found in homes, programming and testing. It was followed by installation of the project, constant monitoring of incoming data and merging different datasets together. The final step was cleaning and analysis of data and drawing conclusions from it.

We wanted to innovatively present our data. For this we turned to merging science and music, and created a lockdown musical where the audience could listen to the changes occuring in the environment through music from multiple instruments.

We fielded a lot of questions from the participants at the end of the workshop. It was an enjoyable experience and we were happy to have this opportunity to share our project and passion with other students.