Friday, May 31, 2013

Project Background and Motivation

During our SURF (Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship Program) at the California Institute of Technology, we will work towards understanding the different patterns in the seismic data during quake and non-quake periods. We hope to be able to apply machine learning techniques on this data to analyse these patterns to help better the early warning systems.

Earthquake data for the past several years has been collected by the California Integrated Seismic Network (CISN), the Community Seismic Network (CSN) at Caltech and a few other such institutions. Current early warning systems however do not make intelligent use of this data to make the process of detecting earthquakes any quicker; they rely solely on picking algorithms which although have proven to be effective, can be made smarter with the use of predictive intelligence of machine learning techniques. Analysis of the patterns of the past earthquakes can help select out a few patterns that have been seen repeatedly over the years to detect potential future threats.


Our research will primarily be based on the fields of data mining and machine learning, the line distinguishing these two fields being thin. The project will be guided by Prof. Julian Bunn, prinicipal computational scientist at Caltech's Centre for Advance Computing Research and Prof. Mani Chandy, professor of Computer Science.

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