Client-Driven, University Student Capstone Project in Environmental Machine Learning

Computational Modeling and Data Analytics (CMDA) majors at Virginia Tech are required to enroll in a Capstone Project course (CMDA 4864) in their senior year. In this course, teams of three or four student spend the semester tackling an open-ended, client-driven project. In the Fall semester of 2019, The Aerospace Corporation sponsored a team of students as they tackled an environmental “big data” problem with a machine learning solution in a cloud environment. In additional to the technical aspects of the project, students are mentored in teamwork, project management, technical leadership, and the ethical aspects of data science and mathematical modeling. This paper describes the project, the student team’s results and lessons learned from the perspective of the students and the Aerospace mentors.