Florida Tech Seed Grant Supports WISE AI Waterway Monitoring

Aug 14, 2026. The Machine Learning Research Group is pleased to announce a 2026–27 Florida Tech Provost Seed Grant for WISE AI—Waterway Instrumentation with Scalable Edge AI. The project will develop and field-test a low-cost monitoring system that combines water-level sensing, camera-based surface-velocity estimation, and onboard artificial intelligence.

The project is led by Georgios C. Anagnostopoulos from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science as Principal Investigator, in collaboration with Dr. Nicolás Velásquez Girón from the Department of Mechanical and Civil Engineering as Co-Investigator. The effort brings together expertise in machine learning, signal and image processing, hydrology, and field measurements.

Many waterways lack the observations needed to support flood forecasting and water-resource management. Conventional monitoring stations can be costly to deploy and maintain, while obtaining reliable flow-velocity measurements presents additional practical challenges. WISE AI will explore how affordable sensors and local data processing can help expand monitoring coverage.

The planned prototype combines a small onboard computer, a camera, a water-level sensor, solar/battery power, and low-bandwidth communications. By processing measurements on the device and storing data locally, it is designed to operate with modest communications requirements and preserve observations during connectivity outages.

The team plans a six-month field comparison against a reference water-level logger, together with independent checks of daylight surface-velocity estimates. The evaluation will assess measurement accuracy, power reliability, communications performance, and the system’s operating limits. The project will also provide graduate and undergraduate research opportunities in prototype development, field validation, machine learning, and data analysis.

Scheduled to run from August 17, 2026 through June 30, 2027, the seed effort will produce a prototype, validation data, and reusable technical documentation to support future work on distributed waterway monitoring.

Learn more on the WISE AI project page.