A group of four University of Michigan students studying areas like aerospace engineering and computer science has developed technology to provide four-day forecasts of ice accumulations on the Great Lakes.
“One important thing was to make sure of, is that ships had the most efficient way of travel throughout the entire Great Lakes, even in these conditions,” Vishnu Yadagani, an aerospace engineering student from Las Vegas and a member of IceScope GL said. IceScope GL was selected as the winning team for the 2025 MiSpace Hackathon, organized by the Michigan Office of Defense and Aerospace Innovation (ODAI). The group was awarded $15,000.
Members used satellite radar data and weather data to develop “a basic model using machine learning in order to predict the ice conditions for our trained data set,” Yadagani said. Using 21 days of ice and weather data, they were able to predict four days into the future.
Those four days of ice prediction would be represented as tiny tiles on a map showing the entire five-lake region “so that each tile has the ice conditions, like, type, concentration, and thickness across the entire Great Lakes,” Yadagani said.
Developing skill sets to grow sectors like maritime transportation and aerospace is in the state’s interest, Mark Ignash, ODAI director of strategic initiatives and ecosystem development, said.
“It was an inaugural project, but I think proved the point we were trying to set out for, which is, we’re not inventing the space economy in Michigan, or the maritime economy. It’s here. We just have to set some more fires to really drive it,” Ignash said.
The six student teams had from mid-October to mid-November to put their projects together. IceScope GL is “still in the early stages of what ‘next’ looks like for us,” member John Akladus, an aerospace engineering student from Philadelphia, said. Other team members are Efaz Rahman, a computer engineering student from Michigan, and Joani Kaleshi of New York, a computer science and engineering student.
“What we’d really love to do is expand this product a little more … improve on our models and make it into a finished product that can really help out Coast Guard, helping other government entities,” Akladus said. “We don’t see this as a finished product at all. And we just want to make sure we iterate on it in the future.”
Coast Guard officials in Michigan were impressed by the student solution, Ignash said, and would like to see the technology put into operation. The MiSpace challenge, he said, “elevates the talent. It elevates our strength in the space economy. It elevates our assets in the maritime domain. So really, for us, it’s amplifying the message of what we can accomplish here as a state. In terms of tech development, that’s up to the teams.”
