Hi, everybody. Today we're speaking with Professor Xiaopeng Shen of Penn State University. He teaches

and research is there as part of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

And the reason we're talking today has to do specifically with our recent news cycle, where

we covered the historic flooding in Texas, and we're continuing to look forward to see a forecast

that includes more flooding, perhaps more flash flood warnings and alerts.

And as I told you, I thought to myself when this

news was developing, well, what about innovation? What about artificial intelligence? We hear so much

about AI. How can AI help perhaps in these sort of situations? So I just started to do a little

research. And the very first article that came up is an article entitled Improving Predictions of Flood Severity, Place and Time with AI.

A novel framework offers accurate water flow predictions and simulations with unprecedented efficiency.

This article was published on July 2nd, 48 hours before this July 4th flood.

And this article is describing Professor Shen's research.

So this is how we connected.

I reached out to Professor Shen.

We had a conversation.

AI is a new topic for a lot of us.

I wanted to make sure I wraps my head around it. And

Professor, it's so nice of you to take time to join us. Thank you. Yeah, thanks for the invitation.

Very glad to be here. I knew we were going to get along when you told me that you're from a very,

very small town in China that only has 20 million people. And I thought, okay, we have a professor that talks about AI that

has a sense of humor. So that's going to work in our favor. So tell me just a little bit

about your journey to this research. I'm going to ask you specifically about your work when it

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