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Some example project ideas

CS 121B (CS1), Spring 2014

Here are some example project ideas in various academic disciplines. Newest ideas appear first

Brief description: Authorship
Description:
Use WMR or other approaches to compare different works in a corpus for authorship. For example, compare word usage in books of one famous author with word usage in books by another author from the same time period; or give evidence that the same person (or that different people) wrote two anonymous works.
Relevant field(s): Literature, Linguistics, Humanities
 
Brief description: Enron email corpus
Description:
In 2001, a major energy company known as Enron Corporation went bankrupt, after a period of fraudulent bookkeeping in which it claimed revenues of $100 billion, and after being named America's Most Innovative Company by Fortune magazine for six consecutive years. A corpus of 1.7 million emails by Enron executives is available on campus for many types of study.
Relevant field(s): Management Studies, Business, Economics, Social Networking, Corpus Linguistics, etc.
 
Brief description: Eliza, the intelligent-sounding software
Description:
A Python3 version of the famous Eliza program, which simulates a conversation with a therapist, is available for experimentation and exploration.
Relevant field(s): Psychology, Artificial Intelligence, Philosophy, Sociology, Media Studies
 
Brief description: Recognizing partially obscured images
Description:
For line drawings, experiment with (electronically) covering up selected portions of an image, to study what are the most important parts of the image for recognition.
Relevant field(s): Psychology, Media
 
Brief description: Beautiful faces
Description:
Create a composite image of several faces, and compare the beauty of the composite to that of the individual faces.
Relevant field(s): Philosophy, Psychology
 
Brief description: Corpus analysis
Description:
Compare digitized works by the same author, and/or works by different authors, using corpus analysis with WMR.
Relevant field(s): Literature, Humanities, Linguistics.
 
Brief description: Economics simulation
Description:
Simulate stock market activity, housing sector activity, etc., using a realistic randomized simulation.
Alternative: compare known economic activity (e.g., stock market closings) to news events that happened at the time.
Relevant field(s): Economics, Management Studies.
 
Brief description: Computer Art
Description:
Create a work of art using turtle graphics.
Relevant field(s): Art
 
Brief description: Curator's assistant
Description:
Create a storage and retrieval system for works of art, providing useful information for museum managers and exhibit curators.
Relevant field(s): Art, Art History, etc.
 
Brief description: Genetic sequences
Description:
Use map-reduce to examine hundreds of actual genetic sequences at once, performing operations such as decomposing them into codons, identifying genes, looking for genes that appear in multiple sequences, etc.
Relevant field(s): Biology, Bioinformatics
 
Brief description: Chemical reaction simulation
Description:
Write a simulation of a particular chemical, using realistic data, and draw visualizations showing substance amounts during the simulation.
Relevant field(s): Chemistry
 
Brief description: Personality types and writings
Description:
Use map-reduce to compare the writings of multiple authors, looking for clues in those writings of the authors' personality types or other characteristics. [RAB note: similar textual analysis problems could be done in other fields.]
Relevant field(s): Psychology [or other fields]