LiDAR Fuel-Load Analytics
Silvaye, LLC · NASA JPL incubator
An end-to-end analytics system automating LiDAR ingestion through fuel-load estimation, built to operationalize a NASA-funded wildfire monitoring concept.
- Role
- Co-founder and Data Science Research Lead; pipeline architecture and capstone supervision
- Dates
- Mar 2024 – Jun 2025
Background
Silvaye began when two founders won a $100,000 NASA award for a wildfire monitoring concept. I was brought on as co-founder and computational lead to turn that funded concept into a working system, and the company went on to complete the NASA JPL incubator program.
What I built
I architected the end-to-end pipeline automating LiDAR ingestion through fuel-load estimation, taking raw scan data through to a number a land manager could use. As industry partner, I also supervised the five-person senior capstone team that built the accompanying IoT sensor hardware.
Why it mattered to my research
Building this as a product rather than a study made the validation problem concrete. A pipeline that returns a number for every scan has to be right on scans nobody looked at. That is what pushed me toward the field-validation work I now do with the Battles Lab.