CISTO Summer 2024 Interns Take on AI and Other Challenges
at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
NASA’s “Summer of AI” (Artificial Intelligence) — a season-long learning campaign — “aims to enhance our workforce’s ability to harness the technical and cultural potential of AI.” Summer interns are no exception, with a record 17 interns growing their knowledge and agency capabilities by tackling AI and other technological challenges across the Computational and Information Sciences and Technology Office (CISTO) at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.
“We know that AI is our future, and our organization must better understand how to enable that future for our scientists,” said CISTO Chief Daniel Duffy. “Collaborating with our summer interns on AI and other projects gave us an opportunity to explore problems from a unique and fresh perspective. I would even say that we learned just as much from their innovative ideas and enthusiasm as they did from us!”
This year’s summer interns were integral members of CISTO’s Advanced Software Technology Group (ASTG), Data Science Group, High-Performance Computing Group and its NASA Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS), Science-Managed Cloud Environment (SMCE) team, and Scientific Visualization Studio (SVS). Working alongside their mentors, interns applied AI and machine learning to a variety of NASA Earth and space science studies, information display design, and supercomputing benchmarking; furthered Earth system modeling by developing testing software and porting model components; and investigated software solutions and tools for enhancing the NCCS supercomputing environment and user experience.
Hear more from 11 CISTO interns about their backgrounds and projects by clicking on the buttons below.
Title
NASA Intern at the NASA Center for Climate Simulation
Terms with CISTO
Summer 2024
Internship Overview
Assisting in the development of ASSERT, regression testing software for supporting Earth system models.
Mentors
Jules Kouatchou
Education
Michael Aidoo is a rising senior at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
Title
Pathways Intern in the CISTO Data Science Group
Terms with CISTO
Spring 2022, Summer 2022, Spring 2023, Summer 2023, and Summer 2024
Internship Overview
Developing a physics-informed neural network to predict crater relaxation on Jupiter’s moon Ganymede.
Mentors
Mark Carroll
Education
Mariana Blanco-Rojas is a Ph.D. student at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana.
Title
NASA Intern for the Earth Information Center (EIC) in the Scientific Visualization Studio
Terms with CISTO
Summer 2024
Internship Overview
Programming interactive displays for EIC locations, developing scripts to load data more efficiently and automatically, and using machine learning to design a wall with color-themed Earth images and mosaics.
Mentors
Brenda Lopez Silva and Michael Chyatte
Education
Ria Gupta is a recent graduate of the University at Buffalo, New York, with a bachelor’s degree in computer science.
Title
NASA Intern in the CISTO Data Science Group
Terms with CISTO
Summer 2024
Internship Overview
Using transfer learning with foundation models to identify dead trees in high-resolution G-LiHT imagery.
Mentor
Mark Carroll, Bruce Cook, Paul Montesano, Jordan A. Caraballo-Vega, and Caleb Spradlin
Education
Sarah King is a graduate student at the University of California, Davis.
Title
NASA Intern in the CISTO Data Science Group
Terms with CISTO
Summer 2024
Internship Overview
Processing data from the IKONOS satellite for canopy height modeling and change detection in Alaska.
Mentor
Mark Carroll and Paul Montesano
Education
Christina Lee is a rising senior at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.
Title
NASA Intern in the CISTO High-Performance Computing Group
Terms with CISTO
Summer 2024
Internship Overview
Utilizing various large language models (LLMs) — Llama3, Gemini, and ChatGPT 4.0 — to translate the STREAM, Linpack, and NAS Parallel Benchmarks from Fortran to Python and evaluate their performance.
Mentors
Johana Chazaro Cortes and Jeremy Raupp
Education
David Li is a rising freshman at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.
Title
High-Performance Computing Intern at the NASA Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS)
Terms with CISTO
Summer 2024
Internship Overview
Investigating various software solutions that may be integrated into NCCS, with research including installation of new technologies, benchmarking, developing recommendations on future use, analyzing performance, and studying techniques to improve operating system provisioning in supercomputing environments..
Mentor
Laura Carriere, Bruce Pfaff, and William Woodford
Education
Morgan Newton is a rising senior studying computer science at the University of California, Irvine.
Title
NASA Intern at the NASA Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS)
Terms with CISTO
Summer 2024
Internship Overview
Exploring task farming tools and creating the NCCS Task Farming (NCCS_TF) package, which utilizes GNU Parallel and Slurm srun to optimize task parallelism.
Mentors
Jules Kouatchou
Education
Rodiat Sanni is an undergraduate computer science student at the University of Maryland, College Park.
Title
NASA Intern at the NASA Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS)
Terms with CISTO
Summer 2023 and Summer 2024
Internship Overview
Developing job intervention protocols on the NCCS Discover supercomputer to increase uptime and scheduler efficiency, ultimately improving user experience.
Mentors
Laura Carriere and Bruce Pfaff
Education
Lucas Snyder is a graduate student at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana.
Title
NASA intern on the CISTO Science-Managed Cloud Environment Team
Terms with CISTO
Summer 2024
Internship Overview
Experimenting with training and evaluating feedforward neural networks to predict corrections applied to physics-based weather models.
Mentors
Hoot Thompson and Daniel Duffy
Education
Matthew Vu is a graduate student at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.
Title
NASA Scientist Programmer Analyst Intern in the CISTO Advanced Software Technology Group
Terms with CISTO
Summer 2024
Internship Overview
Kickstarting the port of Moist Physics from the GEOS model to the NOAA-NASA Domain Specific Language (NDSL) middleware layer by leveraging the open-source packages GT4Py and DaCe, focusing on Radiation Coupling and Aerosol Activation in the GEOS Atmospheric General Circulation Model, while contributing to the maturation and debugging of the developing framework.
Mentors
Florian Deconinck and Christopher Kung
Education
Matthew Weil graduated from Ithaca College in Ithaca, New York, in May 2024, and will be attending Boston University in Boston, Massachusetts, to pursue graduate education in air quality remote sensing and modeling.
Jarrett Cohen, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
August 28, 2024
