UF undergraduate students partner with Tampa Electric Company to improve meter data environment

Utilizing HiPerGator — the University of Florida’s AI supercomputer — five students helped build a function to identify incorrectly labeled meters for Tampa Electric Company. 

By leveraging geographic information system technology and voltage data from more than 500,000 customer meters, the team developed a Python model on HiPerGator to detect and rank misplaced meters by severity. The students found that about 0.3% of the meters in their dataset were considered outliers — a finding that will serve to improve the quality of Tampa Electric Company’s data environment.

“Being able to come together with this group of people that I had not met before, and then do work that none of us had even done before, but at a level that I was very proud [was super invaluable],” said Tyler Metz (B.S. Computer Science ’24), the team lead for the project, which was funded by an AI Across the Statewide Curriculum National Science Foundation grant.

In addition to Metz, the team included Sam Wright (B.S. Mathematics ’25, B.S. Data Science ’25), Sophie Bénéteau (B.S. Mathematics ’26), Bhaskar Gnanasakthi (B.S. Computer Science ’26, M.S.F. ’26), and John McDonald (B.S. Mathematics ’25, B.S. Statistics ’25). 

Read more about the project in this story on UF News.