Michael Liu takes us on a tour of the Floating Solar Explorer, an interactive, GIS-based R Shiny web app that visualizes water reservoirs alongside economic data and political boundaries. Along with the website itself, the presentation explores certain aspects of the data generation process using R and provide an introduction to R Shiny.
Michael gives us a brief overview of the City of Cohoes Floating Solar project and the role the Floating Solar Explorer played in winning important grants, and then demonstrates and describes the structure of the app, including some of the performance challenges imposed by the size of the datasets. If you're interested in Shiny apps in general or apps that utilize geo-based data in particular, this is the RPIrates for you!
Find the Floating Solar Explorer at: https://bit.ly/floating_solar
Michael Liu worked on the Floating Solar Explorer as an undergraduate researcher with the Rensselaer IDEA during the summer of 2022. Michael is a last-semester senior majoring in computer science. Upon his graduation from RPI this December, he hopes to extend his background in computer science by exploring the field of business analytics