Bishal Dhungana
26.7153° N, 80.0534° W — WEST PALM BEACH, FL

Turning imagery and LiDAR into cloud systems that run real infrastructure.

Geospatial Data Scientist working end to end — computer vision on drone imagery and LiDAR (including a detection model I personally trained and deployed to production on AWS SageMaker), cloud pipelines and infrastructure-as-code, and the AI agents that tie it together — from field survey to production platforms protecting critical utility infrastructure.

Computer VisionLiDAR / Point CloudsCloud & AWSGeospatial Data EngineeringAgentic AI
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Drone Images Pipelined
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Condition Reports Joined
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Asset Types Modeled
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Addresses Geocoded
Simulated LiDAR scan
drag to rotate
AI Agents · LangGraph
Cloud · AWS Lambda / S3
Computer Vision · PyTorch
01 — About

Field-to-production, end to end

I work at the intersection of geospatial engineering, applied AI, and cloud data platform engineering — currently as a Data Scientist at Florida Power & Light, technical lead across their AI-based infrastructure inspection program, building the data pipelines and GIS applications behind it, plus a computer vision model I personally trained and deployed to production. My background started in the field as a Geomatics Engineer in Nepal, then sharpened through flood-hazard research at Florida Atlantic University, which led to a peer-reviewed publication and a co-authorship on PyWMP, an open-source watershed modeling framework. Outside of work I build open-source geospatial AI tools — see Featured Builds below.

beesal13dh@gmail.com FAA Part 107 — Remote Pilot
02 — Experience

Professional experience

APR 2025 — PRESENT
Florida Power & Light - Contract
Data Scientist — Geospatial & AI
Program & Vendor
  • Contributed technical requirements for a multi-million dollar AI vendor engagement, then served as subject-matter expert through model development, validation, and benchmarking.
Machine Learning
  • Separately trained and deployed a custom equipment detection and segmentation model to production using AWS SageMaker across dev, test, and prod environments, running continuously on utility inspection and storm-response imagery.
Data Engineering for AI
  • Built a pipeline joining 8M+ drone inspection images with 350K+ historical condition reports via spatial/temporal joins, writing enriched results back through batched API calls.
  • Led training dataset delivery across 25+ asset types and 400+ condition classes; built a Streamlit app so teams could pull images by asset or class instead of searching by hand.
Platform & Infrastructure
  • Designed an AWS CDK infrastructure-as-code framework with enterprise naming, tagging, and deployment patterns used across ML and application workloads.
  • Built a data integration platform (Python, SQL, DuckDB) with a FastAPI/React console, and manage the PostGIS databases and AWS (Lambda, S3, SageMaker) architecture behind it.
Applications
  • Built and deployed GIS applications (ArcGIS Enterprise, Experience Builder, Dashboards, Utility Network) for infrastructure monitoring and disaster response — engineering spatial web portals used in real time during Hurricane Milton to track structural impacts, outages, and crew deployment.
SEP 2024 — MAR 2025
Florida Power & Light - Contract
Associate Geospatial Analyst
  • Led QA/QC of LiDAR-derived power grid data for infrastructure resilience work, including pole hardening.
  • Managed PostgreSQL/PostGIS databases, optimized Cloud-Optimized GeoTIFFs, and automated QA workflows in FME, ArcPy, and Model Builder to streamline data storage and validation.
  • Built a FastAPI sidecar for heavier geoprocessing and format conversion.
JAN 2023 — AUG 2024
Florida Atlantic University
Graduate Research Assistant
  • Led flood risk research using FEMA hydrologic/hydraulic methods, resulting in a peer-reviewed publication on flood hazard exposure and social vulnerability — including environmental justice disparities in disaster impact.
  • Built an automated ArcGIS Pro geoprocessing pipeline, cutting processing time by 50%.
  • Built a Python geocoding tool processing 3 million addresses, replacing a paid service — cut turnaround from 3 months to 1 week and saved $20K in licensing.
DEC 2020 — DEC 2022
Freelance & ADMC Engineering, Nepal
Geomatics Engineer / GIS Intern
  • Led survey teams for municipal road, control, and construction surveys, including GNSS landmark and UAV topographic/transmission-line surveys.
  • Designed municipal geodatabases (land use, soil, cadastral, resource maps) with topology and attribute rules.
  • Served as GIS expert for Nepal's Survey Department land-use hand-over program, training 40+ officials in spatial analysis and database management.
03 — Featured Builds

Self-directed AI & geospatial projects

Open-source contributions built outside of my employment, focused on hazard-resilient geospatial AI and critical infrastructure. Most ship with a live demo; nothing here requires an API key to try.

Also shipped

Outside the core hazard/geospatial focus — still real, shipped work

Currently building

Private repos, in active development — details intentionally light

Live Straight from GitHub — auto-refreshes daily

04 — Systems & Platform Engineering

What sits behind the models

The Experience section above covers the program-level work — this is a few platform-layer components that don't fit neatly into a resume bullet.

Cloud Infrastructure

Cloud Infrastructure Components

AWS CDK component framework with enterprise naming, tagging, and deployment abstractions for ML and app workloads.

Computer Vision

Utility Asset Detection Inference Service

ONNX-based object detection package for utility equipment with COCO JSON output and optional visualization.

Data Engineering

Schema Migration Utility

PostgreSQL schema migration CLI with source/target connection separation, dry runs, and preflight checks.

Integration Toolkit

API + Taxonomy Integration Toolkit

Reusable package for API extraction, taxonomy joins, metadata patching, and downstream publishing automation.

05 — Toolkit

What I build with

Machine Learning & Computer Vision

PyTorchTensorFlow/KerasUltralytics YOLORT-DETRDetectron2 ResNetXGBoostOpenCVONNX

Generative AI & Agentic Systems

LangChainLangGraphRAG Model Context ProtocolFastMCPVector Databases OllamaChromaHugging Face Transformers

Data Engineering

PythonSQLETL/ELT Pipelines DuckDBDatabricksData LakesParquet

Geospatial

ArcGIS Pro / Enterprise / OnlineUtility NetworkPostGIS DuckDB SpatialGDALPDALGeoPandas ShapelyPyProjLiDAR / Point CloudOverture Maps Cloud-Optimized GeoTIFFFoliumFME

Cloud & DevOps

AWS LambdaS3SageMaker ECR / ECSAWS CDKDocker IAMVPC / Network SecurityCI/CD

Software Engineering

JavaScript / TypeScriptRFastAPIReactStreamlit

Field

GNSS / GPS SurveyUAV Survey (FAA Part 107) Differential GNSSGeodatabase Design
06 — Research & Selected Work

Publications & academic projects

Most of my professional work is confidential to the organizations I've supported — publications below are what I can share in full.

Dhungana, B.; Liu, W. Urban–Rural Exposure to Flood Hazard and Social Vulnerability in the Conterminous United States. ISPRS Int. J. Geo-Inf. 2024, 13, 339. doi.org/10.3390/ijgi13090339 ↗
Co-author, open-source software — PyWMP ↗, a Python watershed modeling and planning framework (Florida Atlantic University).Manuscript in review
07 — Credentials

Education & certifications

MSc, Geosciences — GIS Concentration · Florida Atlantic University · 2023–2024 · GPA 4.0/4.0

BSc, Geomatics Engineering · Tribhuvan University, Nepal · 2016–2021 · GPA 3.64/4.0

NASA ARSET Certifications (12) — applied remote sensing training across climate risk assessment & projection, disaster & building-infrastructure risk modeling, wildfire and watershed impacts, ecosystem services, air quality (geostationary satellites & environmental justice), water quality (inland lakes & SeaDAS), soil moisture/drought, flood monitoring & modeling, and urban heat vulnerability.

Esri Training Certifications (8) — GIS Basics, Cartography, Spatial Data Science, Imagery Analysis, Spatial Analysis, GIS for Climate Action, GIS/BIM integration for AEC, and deep-learning object classification in ArcGIS Pro.

08 — Contact

Let's talk about what you're building.

Open to Data Science, GIS/Geospatial Engineering, and Data/Platform roles. Based in West Palm Beach, FL.