2,893 Inspirational Passion Project Ideas
Turn inspirations into your passion project.
This collection of project ideas, shared by Polygence mentors, is meant to help inspire student thinking about their own project. Students are in the driver seat of their research and are free to use any or none of the ideas shared by their mentors.
- AI/ML
- Animation
- Arts
- Biology
- Biotech
- Business
- Cancer
- Chemistry
- Cognitive
- Computer Science
- Creative Writing
- Dance
- Dentistry
- Economics
- Engineering
- Entomology
- Environmental Science
- Ethics
- Fashion
- Finance
- Game Design
- Healthcare
- History
- Illustration
- Languages
- Linguistics
- Literature
- Math
- Medicine
- Music
- Neuroscience
- Nutrition
- Organizational Leadership
- Philanthropy
- Philosophy
- Photography
- Physics
- Psychiatry
- Psychology
- Public Health
- Quantitative
- Social
- Social Science
- Sports Analytics
- Statistics
- Surgery
Sentiment Analysis: Twitter Data and Market Shifts
Analyzing tone and sentiment of prominent political and industry figures as they correlate with market movements, based on company and industry-specific tweet content.
Computer Science, Linguistics, AI/ML
Bilingualism and cognition
How does bilingualism affect general cognition? In turn, how does cognition affect bilingualism? In this project, we will examine the intersection of bilingualism and domain-general cognitive processes such as attention, executive function, cognitive control, and memory. We will also review the similarities and differences between various types of bilinguals, such as simultaneous bilinguals vs. late learners.
Neuroscience, Linguistics, Cognitive
The Power of Listening
Have you ever wondered how children are able to learn a new language without taking any classes? No lectures, no flashcards, no textbooks, no quizzes. We all learned how to speak by simply listening to the world around us. The more we understand about human communication, the better we can foster our relationships with each other. Let's talk about language acquisition, and design a research experiment that explores the power of listening.
Music, Linguistics, Cognitive
Robot Ed Sheeran: Making an AI Composer
Current state-of-the-art ML for music (see: OpenAI, Google Magenta) is bad at learning long-form structure. I believe this is because their approach of swallowing and vomiting MIDI files does not reflect the vast amount of prior information we have as humans: we have ears that pick up on the subtle ways that pitches interact, and we're hard-wired to understand linguistic structures. Let's build a better AI with these inductive biases and generate some funk!
Neuroscience, Math, Linguistics, AI/ML
Beyoncé as Poetry? Street Performance as Prose?
Rap. Movies. Musicals. That street performer who jumped over your head. Writing does not just mean a poem by a white man from the 1800s. Writing is the accordion player on the subway. The giggling baby dancing in a snow suit. Through this project we'll uncover how words show up in our everyday surroundings through (non?)fiction and poetry, using as many artistic mediums as you wish.
Creative Writing, Linguistics
Criminal/Legal Case Study
Are you fascinated by crime? Pick a particular court case and dive into the evidence, trial transcripts, and case law. Or, pick a certain kind of crime and review the range of cases that fall under that verdict. You can share your findings in an investigative report or in a true crime podcast. You will gain experience reading legal texts, sorting through different kinds of information, checking the validity of sources, and learning about crime, law, and the justice system.
Languages, Linguistics, Cognitive
(Intermediate/Advanced) Efficacy of math education methods in different countries
Basically every country agrees that math is an important topic to study in schools, but how to go about teaching math differs wildly between all of them. This project would study different math teaching methods throughout a number of countries along with a specified parameter (such as test results, future academic success, research success, etc) to measure the efficiency of each method and what results each method provides. This could culminate in a paper, a podcast or other creative project, or a presentation.
Music, Math, Linguistics
Rhetorical questions
Many questions aren't asked in order to get an answer, like "Are you trying to get yourself killed?". What do they communicate, and can we build models which help us understand this more precisely?
Linguistics, AI/ML
Detecting bots on Twitter
Now that computers are good enough to generate very convincing text completely on their own, people have become quite concerned about "fake news". In this project, we will investigate how easy it is to detect Tweets that have been written by computers in four steps: 1) Collect some data, some possibly labelled already as "fake". 2) Look at the statistical properties of "real" Tweets versus "fake" Tweets. 3) Write a computer program, for example a Naive Bayes classifier, for labelling new Tweets as "real" or "fake". 4) Evaluate how good the program is using a sensible metric.
Math, Linguistics, AI/ML
Arabian Nights
Students can choose from any of the “Arabian Nights” tales, and depending on language expertise, we will work through it reading in either English or Arabic (or a mix of the two). We will explore, analyze, and attempt to define some of the most common themes in the text: the power of storytelling, magic, adventure, fate, etc.
Literature, Languages, Creative Writing, Linguistics, Social Science
Critical Humanities Study of Your Choice
We can design and carry out together a project on anything in the humanities that interests you. Though I'm mainly a scholar of literature, philosophy, and music, we can work on anything in the humanities that interests you.
Music, Philosophy, Linguistics
Social Media and NLP
Study data from social media to better understand how, when and why do people change their opinions (e.g. about immigration, globalization).
Linguistics
Iconicity
A general feature of human languages is that the way words sound rarely has anything to do with what they mean. However, this is not always the case; for example, words beginning with "gl" often have similar meanings ("glimmer", "glisten", "gleam"). How often do these "form-meaning" mappings occur across languages, and why?
Linguistics, AI/ML
Music and Poetry: Song, Opera, Lyrics, Fiction, and More
In my dissertation, I took a personally and politically reflective look at the relationship between poetry and music in the songs (or Lieder, in German) of Schubert, Schumann, Beethoven, Brahms, and so forth. We can do something similar for anything that interests you at this interface between what writers and composers do, and how performers and audiences mediate these inter-artistic conjunctions. I'm most comfortable with music in the tradition of European classical music, but we can explore any genre that interests you.
Music, Philosophy, Linguistics
Politeness
Study how politeness, kindness and other behavioral phenomena are expressed differently across languages (e.g. English vs Mandarin Chinese), by using large-scale datasets.
Linguistics
The Future of Social Media Platforms
Social media platforms have gained much popularity all over the world in the last two decades. This has shrunk the world in terms of knowledge sharing and communication. Social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook are considered the main sources of breaking news these days. They were thought of as empowering individuals to publish their ideas. This was thought of as the democratization of knowledge and the end of censorship on social and political ideas. Recently, social media platforms are accused of being the main source for spreading fake news, hate speech, bullying and even prompting racial intolerance. This research investigates current practices of social media platforms and seek to come up with recommendations for maintaining the democratization of knowledge without promoting fake news and racial intolerance.
Linguistics, AI/ML
Student Led Web Application
Project purpose would be open ended: essentially students can pick whatever idea/problem they would want to tackle and be guided through the process of creating a web application for it. This includes understanding the full layout of designing a web application, picking what tech stack to develop in (e.g. React front end, Python backend), creating a dynamic UI front end, deploying a robust back end, and testing the project out! Students are encouraged to create a data visualization component as part of the application (humans are visual creatures!). End goal of this project is to be able to deploy the project to go live as well as having the student develop a proficient understanding on how modern day web applications are created and how to solve software engineering problems!
Computer Science, Linguistics
Are you a computer?
Does a person's mind relate to their body as a computer's software relates its hardware? Those who answer ``yes'' endorse the Computational Theory of Mind (CTM). CTM commits you to the view that many, if not all, of a person's mental processes (e.g., their thinking and reasoning) are computer softwares executed by their brain. CTM is fascinating because it gives a unifying answer to a wide array of questions from across the history and philosophy of psychology. Nevertheless, there is broad disagreement over whether CTM is a genuine scientific organizing principle or a merely convenient metaphor. We'll start by familiarizing ourselves with the origins and content of CTM. After that, we'll branch out in accord with your interests. Whichever way we go, we'll strive for a deeper philosophical understanding of how our mental processes facilitate our capacity to navigate and alter our environment. Pre-requisites: A curiosity for the relationship between the mind, body, and environment is all that's required. We will start with thoughtful columns, podcasts, or videos authored by science communicators and public philosophers and engage with recent research and historical movements where needed.
Linguistics, Cognitive
Explore slang trends in twitter corpora
Slang is rapidly changing, and may vary a lot depending on the age/gender/community of the speaker. The student will extract tweets from Twitter and explore trends in slang use over time. The student, through this project, can get an introduction into basic text analysis/processing techniques.
Computer Science, Languages, Linguistics
What are games good for?
``Common sense'' wisdom alleges that games are a waste of time, if not a social ill. Playing games allegedly weakens our character and stymies our goals. Social media platforms allegedly ruined political discourse by turning them into games. In contrast, some sciences and their associated philosophies value games as vehicles for exploring and explaining their subject matter. Economists and ecologists often ``model'' certain behaviors as optimal strategies for winning games with certain pay-off structures. Linguists often ``model'' types of conversations as ``language games'' with distinctive goals, rules, and scoreboards. But are games good for their own sake? Is there a characteristic good or value to ``just playing a game''? Together we'll look at discussions by artists, game designers, and philosophers about how games comprise a distinctive artform valuable for their own sake. From there, we'll branch out in accord with your interests. Whichever way we go, we'll strive for a deeper philosophical understanding of just what it is games are good for. Pre-requisites: A curiosity for what makes games, arts, or scientific explanations special is all that's required. We will start with thoughtful columns, podcasts, or videos authored by science communicators and public philosophers and engage with recent research where needed.
Linguistics, Cognitive