We rely on our partners, staff, faculty and students to answer the questions that define our generation. You can help.

For William & Mary Students:

W&M STUDENTS: APPLY HERE
The Process

Each semester, students can apply to be a member on one of our four teams - geoAnalytics, geoParsing, geoBoundaries and geoDev.  Applicants go through a two-stage process, filling out an online form and then (if selected) going through a short in-person meeting with the team lead for the geo team you are interested in joining.  Selection is very competitive - we generally get about 20 applicants for each individual we admit into the lab; you will generally hear back from us at the end of the semester in which you apply.  The application form can be found here.

The Commitment

Students in the geoLab are expected to work a minimum of 4 hours a week with their team, generally as a part of a weekly team meeting.  Students who opt to do so can participate at a higher number of hours as a part of semester-long projects (for course credit or, in some cases, paid), but such additional commitments are always optional.  In addition, students are expected to attend at least one orientation session at the beginning of their time with the lab.

The Benefits

In addition to providing an opportunity to get real-world research experience during your time at William and Mary, students that join the lab have access to the following resources and opportunities:

  • Ability to apply to geoFellowships, semester-long research opportunities working with external groups to analyze spatial data (see past examples of these opportunities here).
  • Unique summer internship opportunities with partners of the geoLab (see where past students have gone here).
  • Access to the geoLab space in ISC 1109, equipped with desktop computers (multi-monitor), workspaces, a beanbag, and the biggest television on campus.  Steps away from Starbucks.
  • Your name on citations for any datasets released by your team in the year(s) in which you participated.
  • Ability to move into leadership roles in the lab, including Team Leads of each project.

For Everyone:

You can help in four ways:
  • Partner with us on Applied Projects. We engage in partnerships with federal and international agencies, in both funded and unfunded capacities. Our core goal is to enable our students experiential opportunities to learn through regular interaction with external groups. Have a tractable, well defined problem our students might benefit from? Contact us.
  • Contribute to our Open Data. We maintain the largest boundary dataset in the world, but we don't do it alone. Anyone with GIS experience can help us improve the geoBoundaries dataset - learn more here.
  • Sponsor a geoFellow. Every year, we fund student fellowships for a selection of students within the lab; these fellows take leadership roles across our portfolio of projects. Fellowships provide financial benefits directly to undergraduate students at William & Mary, generally around $1000 an academic year.
  • Buy us a pizza. You would be shocked how much we can get done with pizza as an incentive.

For Highschool Students Interested in Remote Summer Internships:

We will be recruiting for our class of summer high school internships during the Spring of 2022.

For Students Enrolled in a College located within the Commonwealth of Virginia:

Apply Now
The Program

25 students will work closely with defense and intelligence partners to test and prototype techniques to identify and automatically mitigate data poisoning in social media streams. This work will build on the fundamental hypothesis that techniques which are effective in detecting data poisoning in imagery models (corrupting pixels in an image to distort deep learning models outputs for example) could also be substantially helpful in detecting data poisoning in models integrating social media (i.e., disinformation which is 'poisoning' the corpus of tweets collected). The William & Mary geoLab has hosted two annual fellowship projects with CCI to date, engaging 99 students in projects exploring the intersection of deep learning, data poisoning, and satellite imagery. These projects have been largely implemented in collaboration with the defense and intelligence industry partners, and have led directly to internship and job opportunities. This is the third round of this project.

The Process

We are soliciting applications to the 2023 CCI geoFellowship program until December 5th, 2023.  Award recepients will be notified by late December.   Students selected for engagement will become eligible for monetary support from a prize pool, pending participation and success in the program. The top performing team in each of the three focal areas will receive a prize.

Requirements
  • Enrolled in an institution of higher education in Virginia during Fall '22 and Spring '23
  • Taken and passed at least one course that taught python programming (in computer science or another discipline).
The Commitment
  • January 2023 - Zoom kickoff event!  We'll give you some very basic models (i.e., support vector machines) to start to explore the differences accompanied by a short training. You will all post your best models to a "kaggle" like competition board we'll setup.
  • Feb 2023 - Next meeting! Introduce deep learning and post your best models.
  • Mar 2023 - Do a deeper pass on your models and start to get feedback from our external partners.
  • Apr 2023 - Submit final models—top models will earn rewards!
  • Summer 2023 - Prizes awarded.
The Benefits

In addition to providing an opportunity to get real-world research experience during your time as a fellow, students that are selected will have access to the following resources and opportunities:

  • Prize pool (monetary rewards), dependent on your performance throughout the project.
  • Unique summer internship opportunities with partners of the geoLab.
  • If you're on-campus at William & Mary, access to the geoLab space in ISC 1109, equipped with desktop computers (multi-monitor), workspaces, a beanbag, and the biggest television on campus.  Steps away from Starbucks.
  • Your name on citations for any publications related to your work.