COLBY COLLEGE NEWS • October 25, 2022
Lots of Mainers are all too familiar with the havoc the hairs can wreak because browntail moths, which were accidentally introduced to New England from Europe in 1897, have been in an outbreak here since 2015. Managing the outbreak has been taxing for agencies like the Maine Forest Service and for communities all over the state. During an all-day datathon in September, teams of Colby students took browntail moth data collected by Thom Klepach and manipulated it with the state-of-the-art data platform Dataiku to try and figure out patterns and potential solutions to the problem. They had nine hours to do useful things with the Artificial Intelligence. “I was pretty impressed by what they were able to do in a day. I worked on that data for weeks and months, and given the extremely short period of time they had, it was pretty interesting what they did,” Klepach said.