Aguascalientes, Ags., August 20, 2024. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Center for Research in Mathematics (CIMAT) collaborated this collaborated this Summer of Research with Dr. Claudia Nayeli Sánchez Gómez, research professor, as well as students from the School of Engineering of our university. Panamericana campus Aguascalientes.
As part of the project that was chosen to work in the Summer Research Program of the School of Engineering, Dr. Claudia Nayeli Sanchez worked on the project "Multispectral Indices for the Non-Invasive Identification of Crop Properties with Genetic Programming", which consisted of using multispectral images for the analysis of the properties of food crops .
"The idea is that by means of a multispectral camera a series of photographs are taken in a range that is often not visible and from this new indexes are generated through genetic programming," says Dr. Claudia Nayeli.
A multidisciplinary team
The project was divided into two parts: the first was in charge of the genetic programming area for feature extraction and the second focused on the statistical part to know the distribution and behavior of the data in order to know how to process them.
The students Ana, Joshua and Luis Fernando developed the genetic programming part, where each one used a different method but with the same characteristics in order to have a variety when obtaining the desired results.
"One of the methods has been with the use of trees, we are creating trees and we are using methods to check how close the data we have are to the real ones. These trees are like functions where we do operations with the different bands of the multispectral images," says Luis Fernando, a student of Artificial Intelligence Engineering.
According to Dr. Claudia, the students work on genetic programming, which is an evolutionary algorithm -within computational sciences and artificial intelligence- that seeks to generate functions.
In this project, students test their knowledge of data structure and programming at an advanced level, as they analyze variables and find ways to combine them to generate new variables, i.e., new features.
"Apart from the characteristics obtained from the multispectral camera, the students are generating new characteristics that are correlated with the properties of the crops, in this case dry matter or sugar content; to be able to identify what exactly are the electromagnetic wave spectra and see which of them correlates more with each of the properties of the crops," Dr. Claudia emphasizes.
In this sense, the purpose of the Research Summers is to give greater depth to academic research with the valuable collaboration of a multidisciplinary team from different educational institutions.
