Fall 2022 Ribbon of Excellence

Student researchers: Mallory Helfenbein, Ethan Yoo, Tanay Bhadra

The Ribbon of Excellence recognizes a team that addressed all the components of the data science lifecycle within their project submission. The data science lifecycle involves asking a question, obtaining data, understanding the data, and using the data to gain insights about the project domain and eventually implementing solutions based on these insights. 

The B612 ADAM (Asteroid Discovery Analysis and Mapping) project aimed to create a map of our solar system's asteroids. B612's precovery algorithm uses an asteroid's orbit to identify observations in a dataset that could belong to that object and its orbit. The cutout visualization program is used to confirm possible asteroids through crosshairs centered at the predicted location and a velocity vector to show the predicted velocity. 

The Precovery algorithm ran an n-body propagation every 7 days, which meant the student researchers had to ensure lossless observations and a way to reduce the runtime. Reducing runtime saved time and money on Google Cloud, and the average time reduction under the condition that all the observations were kept was 58%. This was done by implementing multiprocessing to shorten the runtime and spread it around the system.

This project covered the entire data science lifecycle by discussing the question, method of obtaining data, descriptions of the preprocessing, exploratory data analysis, and models used to obtain insights from this data, the insights obtained and their limitations, and the potential actions to be taken based on the insights from the model.