Engineers explore the Guatemalan jungle

It's not every day that you get to explore the jungles of Guatemala as an undergraduate or graduate student. But that's exactly what students in the Engineers for Explorations program get to do every year.

They are led by computer science professor Ryan Kastner and Qualcomm Institute research scientist Albert Lin. Kastner and Lin in turn work with USC archeologist Tom Garrison, Edwin Roman-Ramirez of UT Austin and Jason Paterniti of the GEOS Foundation.

The goal of the yearly expeditions is using drones equipped with LIDAR to find new Maya archeological sites and help document existing sites. Researchers also hope to develop new technologies to speed up data gathering at archeological sites.

You can find out more about last year's expedition here.