Felix Kasiti Isundwa’s Placement Report

During my placement at the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA) in Stirling from February to July 2025, I worked within the Operational Flood Intelligence team on a project focused on disaster assessment and early warning. My primary work involved designing and implementing a near-real-time disaster intelligence system that integrated satellite emergency mapping data with feeds from social and mainstream media sources. A key deliverable of this work was a Jupyter Notebook pipeline built in Python that collected and processed tweets, performing text cleaning and preprocessing before applying deep learning models to classify whether each post was genuinely discussing a flood event or not. Flood-relevant tweets were then geolocated and plotted on interactive maps, providing SEPA with a clear, visual picture of where flooding was being reported in near-real-time by the public. This tool enhanced SEPA’s situational awareness during flood events, enabling faster and more informed decision-making in the early stages of a disaster by supplementing traditional monitoring with crowd-sourced social intelligence.

The placement equipped me with a diverse and highly transferable set of skills. Technically, I gained substantial experience in Python-based data science workflows  including text cleaning and natural language processing, deep learning for text classification, geospatial data handling, and map visualisation all developed and documented within reproducible Jupyter Notebook environments. I also developed a practical understanding of how cutting-edge AI and earth observation technologies can be operationalised within a regulatory and emergency response context, translating research-level methods into tools with direct operational impact. Working at SEPA gave me valuable experience collaborating within a multidisciplinary team of hydrologists, data scientists, and emergency planners, strengthening my ability to communicate technical findings to non-specialist audiences and contribute meaningfully to real-world environmental protection and disaster resilience work.