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]