CEAMLS Summer Research Program 2026

Learn to build a post-disaster damage assessment API.

An interactive, code-first tutor that teaches every cell of the FastAPI app behind ATC-20 building safety placards — from GET /health to ONNX inference on 16-bit GeoTIFF satellite imagery.

Duration
5 weeks
Level
Beginner
Stack
FastAPI · ONNX · Rasterio
End-to-end pipeline
  1. Image Upload
    GeoTIFF or JPG/PNG
  2. File Validation
    Magic bytes + size
  3. Preprocessing
    Bands, normalize, tensor
  4. AI Inference
    ONNX Runtime forward
  5. %
    Damage Class
    Softmax + entropy
  6. ATC-20 Placard
    GREEN / YELLOW / RED
  7. Recommendations
    Engineer action

Core concepts, in plain English

FastAPI

A modern Python framework for building web APIs. The server FastAPI runs is what the browser talks to when you upload an image.

Endpoint

A URL the server knows how to answer — e.g. GET /health returns server status, POST /classify accepts an image and returns a damage class.

Pydantic schema

A class that declares the exact shape of request and response data, so invalid input is rejected with a clear error before reaching your code.

ONNX

A portable file format for trained models. Loading model.onnx is faster and requires no PyTorch on the server.

ATC-20 placard

An official post-earthquake/disaster tag system. Engineers post GREEN (safe), YELLOW (restricted), or RED (unsafe) on a building.

5-Week Roadmap