IEEE MIT Undergraduate Research Technology Conference (Cambridge, Massachusetts)

In October 2025, Maxwell Mamishev and Zheng Liu published and presented "Nimbusort: Advanced Detection of Ionospheric Disturbances Using EM Signatures" at the IEEE MIT Undergraduate Research Technology Conference, hosted at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The IEEE MIT Undergraduate Research Technology Conference is an internationally renowned venue "for undergraduates and by undergraduates," staffed by MIT students in collaboration with IEEE, and built around student technical presentations.

The ionosphere plays a decisive role in shaping radio-wave propagation and, by extension, the integrity of RF systems that depend on stable propagation paths. However, detecting transient ionospheric events in real operational environments remains difficult because event signatures can be short-lived, embedded in high-interference backgrounds, and frequently exhibit overlapping time-frequency characteristics across different sources, making reliable differentiation and attribution a persistent technical obstacle.

Our paper introduces Nimbusort, a scalable framework for automatically differentiating ionospheric disturbance events using electromagnetic signatures. The work develops a family of short-time Fourier transform (STFT) spectrogram analysis algorithms and applies them to 24 TB of field data, enabling systematic comparisons of spectral morphology and temporal dynamics across multiple event types, including meteors/meteorites, Falcon rocket launches, and space debris re-entries. By establishing a structured baseline of discriminative features and a comprehensive feature table derived from observed signals, Nimbusort lays the groundwork for automated, data-driven ionospheric transient detection that can support both scientific interpretation and operational anomaly detection at scale.