Awards and Honors

I am very honored to receive the "2023 Award for Excellence in Research at the Ph.D. Level" in the Zachry Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Texas A&M Unversity. This remarkable achievement comes as the perfect culmination of my journey as a Ph.D. student at TAMU, being awarded on the very last day of this wonderful academic endeavor!

Full news:  https://tamids.tamu.edu/2023/05/01/wildfire-challenge-awards/

I'm excited to announce that our team, InfernotiX, succeeded at the 2023 TAMIDS Data Science Competition hosted by Texas A&M Institute of Data Science. Our project, titled "Remote-Sensing and Environmental Data Fusion for Wildfire Propagation Prediction: A CNN-Segmentation and Pixel-Based Enhanced Support Vector Machine," won multiple awards including 1st Place, Best Use of Additional Data, and Best Progress Graphic Prize. This event has left an indelible mark on the final stage of my Ph.D. study in Zachry Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Texas A&M University!

I would like to thank Xukai Zhang and Bahareh Alizadeh for their strong support and all the hard work throughout the competition. I also want to thank our advisors, Dr. Arash Noshadravan and Dr. Amir H. Behzadan, for their wonderful guidance and mentorship.

Full story: Texas A&M Today and tx.ag/Cheng

YouTube video

I am thrilled to share that I won the 10th 2022-2023 3MT competition in the Doctoral Category at Texas A&M University!!!

All finalists gave excellent speeches this year! I am thankful for having strong support from my department and particularly from my advisors, Dr. Arash Noshadravan and Dr. Amir H. Behzadan. I also want to thank my dear friend, Dr. Namgyun Kim (2021-2022 3MT winner at Texas A&M) who gave me valuable suggestions and feedback. The credit for this award should be given to the department, my advisors, my colleagues and friends, and my family.

During my academic career, I gave presentations at several conferences before the 3MT. I preferred to use slides to guide me in the narratives of the speech. However, this 3MT competition has strict rules (e.g., no jargon, only 3 minutes, and ONLY one static slide without animations). This competition has helped me enhance my presentation skills by having the ability to leverage clear body language and simple words to convey core research ideas to a general audience within 3 minutes.

I was also the overall winner and will continue on to represent Texas A&M at the regional competition in Tampa, FL March 3-4, 2023, during the Conference of Southern Graduate Schools meeting. Stay tuned! (P.S. a large trophy with my name on it will be placed in our department for the next year!!!)

I am humbled and honored to announce that our DoriaNET dataset was selected for the 2nd Place Award of the Inaugural Best Data Award Competition of the ASCE DSA community. 

My pleasure to participate (as one of the finalists) in the Probabilistic Methods Committee (PMC) Student Paper Competition" (June 1, 2022) held at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, USA.

It was my honor to participate in the 2019 Scholarship /Fellowship Banquet (November 7, 2019) held at  Hilton College Station & Conference Center with my dear friend, Yue Chen.