Fruitful Memory as KGEO Internship

Hi!

This blog might be a little different from my previous ones. Honestly, I didn’t know where else to write this if not here. By the way, I’m officially a senior student now—currently in my 7th semester (as of December 2024). I’m back here because I need to share my internship experience in Thailand.

I spent 6 months interning at the KGEO unit under King Mongkut's University of Technology Thonburi. Never in my life did I imagine I’d actually board a plane to the Land of Smiles! During my internship, I worked as a research assistant and data analyst. It was such a beautiful and rewarding experience. Living in a big city and handling multiple analysis projects definitely sharpened both my hard and soft skills. So, this blog is dedicated to sharing my journey during my internship (July 1 – December 21, 2024).

I was responsible for at least two analysis projects and one machine learning project. From early July to mid-August, I worked on a project titled "Effect of Climate Change on Ground Water Recharge: A Case Study of Northeast Thailand". It was my first time dealing with climate model data—both historical and future projections. I used CMIP6 for future climate data and WorldClim for historical data.

Honestly, it was a pretty stressful period since I wasn’t familiar with the data formats, calculations, or even where to start! So, my first step was to read research papers—literally from morning until morning again. I needed to understand the concepts and what kind of results I should expect.

For this project, I used a method called NISTOR-CEGW, which required temperature and precipitation data. Fun fact—I even made a mistake where my mapping results ended up looking like zebra stripes (let’s just forget about that, okay?).

After spending 1.5 months immersed in this project, I came to a bittersweet conclusion. The results made me feel both concerned and empathetic. The areas impacted by climate change—especially groundwater recharge—are expanding! This means drought-affected regions are becoming larger.

I have attach the results of my analysis below. 


My second project was PM 2.5 Analysis for my own capital city—Jakarta! It was both surprising and super exciting. The project felt challenging yet very cool. I had to calculate several related parameters, such as building density, population density, and road density, to support decision-making on where we should place air purifiers to help clean the air. I spent the rest of my internship working on this project.

One part that still makes me laugh was when I spent an entire week walking around different areas of Jakarta to figure out why the PM 2.5 concentrations were so high. Honestly, since I already gained some experience from my first project, I was able to adapt much faster to this one. But still, there were a lot of small tasks to complete before I could tackle the big picture. I loved how this project allowed me to keep questioning and satisfying my curiosity through data exploration.

The last project I worked on was also the one I used for my thesis—Semantic Segmentation of Rivers using satellite imagery and deep learning architectures. I can’t remember the exact timeline when I worked on this project during my internship, but I do vividly recall how many times I cried and got frustrated over it (which is funny now when I think about it). I had to build my dataset from scratch using Sentinel-1 C-Band SAR Ground Range Detected Interferometric Wide Swath data (what a long name!). At first, I messed up the bands I needed to use and misunderstood the term dual polarization, which forced me to recreate the entire dataset with the correct concept.

For the deep learning architecture, I implemented U-Net and DeepLabv3+. I struggled a lot to fully grasp how these segmentation architectures work. Sometimes, after crying out of frustration, I’d end up laughing and pranking my advisor in Thailand—P’Boy!

But in the end, I finished the project successfully! My model achieved 94% accuracy, and the testing results were impressive too. I’m so grateful for the memories (and struggles) I had while working on this project.

Aside from those three main projects, my internship experience was incredibly valuable. Special thanks to all my supportive lecturers—Mr. Yota and Mr. Pariwate, as well as the research team at KGEO—P’Boy, P’Nalin, and our “rich guy” P’James. They made me feel so welcomed and patiently guided me throughout the process.

I honestly miss those times—like when P’Boy scolded us for something small, like naming files incorrectly or transferring the wrong data. Or how P’Nalin often gave us snacks whenever she saw us looking frustrated. Below, I’ve attached some of the fun memories we made during my internship at KGEO!

Weekly Meeting with Staff and KGEO Directure (Mr. Pariwate)


Attend the Thailand Research Expo 2024

Trip to Nakhon Pathom Province, Thailand

Trip to Kanchanaburi Province, Thailand


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