Bio

Mohammad “Mads” Bahrami is a quantum researcher and lecturer with a great passion for teaching. As a gold medalist in the International Chemistry Olympiad, Denmark, in 2000, Mads has been teaching chemistry at leading high schools and colleges since he was 18. After getting his PhD in physical chemistry, Mads joined the top Iranian university as a professor of chemistry. He then moved to Europe and collaborated with leading EU research groups on quantum foundations for five years. He also taught different lower-level and upper-level courses (e.g. from general chemistry to the application of group theory in physics). Mads is now a lecturer of chemistry at California State University in Los Angeles, interacting with one of the most diverse student populations in the world. He is also collaborating with experimental research groups worldwide on testing foundation quantum theory at unprecedented scales. He is very passionate about implementing new computational approaches for active learning and research.

Computational Essay

de Broglie-Bohm Pilot-wave Description of Double-slit Experiment»

Project: Water Basin Delineation

Goal

Detailed digital information about water is of great importance not only for urban design and development but also for geopolitical strategic plans. A large portion of the world population is now living in water-stress regions. There are alarming patterns between the water crisis and political/civil unrest in parts of the world (e.g. Yemen and Syria). Therefore, having a digital model of water sources is essential. The main goal of this project is to extract the hydrographic basin (also called the drainage basin) of a river or lake out of digital elevation maps. We will process the images from OpenStreetMap using the Wolfram Language. With the digital elevation map, we will first identify the local minimum point of a given map to identify a lake or a river within the map. Then we shall go up through the map following the local minimum points until we reach a local maximum. With our model, one can define regions of land that certainly need a unified strategy for any water management plans. With this model in force, one will be able to analyze a water crisis in more detail for further evaluations.

Main Results in Detail

Detailed watershed segmentation of a geographical region is obtained using built-in morphological functions of the Wolfram Language that we applied on the raw digital elevation model (DEM) of the region. The watershed lines dividing neighboring basins, together with their elevation values, are extracted from the DEM. We treated the centroid of sub-basins as vertices of a graph where connections between neighboring vertices depend on the land-surface characteristics and boundary lines. We assumed that a valid connection between two vertices (say, two sub-basins) can be made only if the two vertices have minimum elevation at the boundary compared to all neighboring vertices.

Conclusion in Detail

Future Work

With the detailed dynamic relationships of hydrographic basins in force, we will be able to develop models describing the water flow (or water level) among basins using the precipitation data. Next, the water usage for irrigation and urban uses can be added into the model. Using this information, one will be able to develop an elaborate model for the water management of a large hydrographic basin. Our approach can be improved further by treating a few loops (cycles) that appear in the graph. In this regard, one can remove the connection between two vertices where the initial one has higher elevation and replace it with the second vertex in the list of neighboring basins sorted by the minimum boundary elevation.