My name is Tori Wilbon and I am a senior at Elizabeth City State University (ECSU) in Elizabeth City, North Carolina majoring in computer science with a concentration in information systems and a minor in geographic information systems (GIS)/remote sensing. I chose to pursue a Computer Science degree because technology, computers and programming in general are very interesting. Computer science also opens the door to a vast array of jobs. My main goal is to obtain a broad knowledge of different areas. This is the reason I chose to concentrate in information systems and minor in GIS/Remote Sensing.

I was awarded the Center of Excellence in Remote Sensing Education and Research (CERSER) scholarship under Dr. Linda Hayden, the Principal Investigator of the CERSER program in 2013. This program has provided me travel to conferences, and a job fair. The program also trained me in GPS, GIS, digital cameras, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Dreamweaver, and knowledge of programming languages such as CSS, JavaScript, Python, and Perl.

During the spring semester of 2014, I was a part of the Multimedia Team research group. The focus of this research was on processing images from a TeraScan system to a database by using the languages PHP and MySQL. The imagery problems from the CERSER server directory were corrected and we also updated the 2011 server script to process the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) images.

The summer of 2014, I had an internship at Indiana University Bloomington (IUB). Dr. Geoffrey Fox, who is a professor in Informatics, directed the lab and my mentor was Mr. Saliya Ekanayake, who is a Ph.D. student at IUB. The project was “Evaluating the Performance of MPI Java in FutureGrid.” The main focus of the project was to convert four programs from Message Passing Interface (MPI) C to MPI Java, then determine the performance to see which program ran the quickest. After getting the results of each program we inserted the results into a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet and graphed each of them. MPI Java performed close enough to MPI C to say the project was a success.

In the spring semester of 2015, I was a part of the TeraScan Team. The project title was “Documentation of Site Preparation for Installation of SeaSpace Ground Stations at ECSU." The main focus was to document the process of the installation of the ground stations. This project consisted of setting up the fifteen visualization stations, the two monitoring stations, and documenting what the SeaSpace contractors did, which was repositioning the two GOES ground stations and rewiring them.

The summer of 2015, I returned to IUB to do an internship in Dr. Geoffrey Fox’s lab. My mentor was Mr. Jerome Mitchell, who also graduated from ECSU and now is a Ph.D. student at Indiana University. The project was titled “Developing an Active Contours Model for Layer Detection from Polar Radar Imagery.” The purpose of the project was to create a program that automatically extracts the surface and bedrock layers from the Antarctic radar images, helping glaciologist, who previously had to go through thousands of images manually.

During the spring semester of 2016, I was on the Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) Team. My mentor was Clay Swindell and the title of our project was “Producing 3D point cloud and digital elevation models through the use of unmanned aerial vehicles, Historic St. Luke’s Church case study”. The focus of our project was to create the digital elevation model, the image mosaic, 3D point cloud and the 3D model of the Historic St. Luke’s Church.

In the Advance GIS class I participated in a project with a teammate and mentor Dr. Jinchun Yuan titled “Correlation between El Niño Southern Oscillation Index and Variations of Normalized Difference Vegetation Index in the Northeast North Carolina." The focus of the project was to see how the ENSO affects the northeast part of North Carolina. The software packages used were Sigma Plot, Microsoft Excel, and a website called Giovanni. These software packages and website shows that the sea surface temperature of NINO 3.4 has little correlation through the seasons versus the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index.

During the summer of 2016 I interned at the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Economic Research Services in the Information Service Division and GIS Research Support Branch. My advisor was Vince Breneman. The main focus was to explore the use of multidimensional mosaic datasets (space time cubes) for analysis and visualization with ESRI products. The software package used were ArcMap and ArcGIS Pro and Python for automation. I used a range of climate data as well as a set of ethanol capacity intensity surfaces to explore software capabilities. I also used R to help load a large daily climate dataset into Amazons Redshift data warehouse solution.

My last spring project in 2017 was titled Continuation of Analyzing Long-Term Drought Effects on Land Surface Temperature and Vegetation Using NOAA Satellite Data. In this project using TeraScan I learned how to restore passes, sample passes and expasc passes for the LST and NDVI. Learning these different commands was a great learning experience for me.

After working with data visualization in my last two internships I gained more experience and interest in the two fields. My ultimate goal is to work in the federal government in either the GIS or the computer science field. To accomplish my goal I want to get more experience and continue on to graduate school.