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.

Check out some projects

Continuous Go Mobile Game

Go is an ancient Chinese board game - like tic tac toe or reversi, players take turns placing pieces on an N x N grid. I think it would be interesting to make a "continuous" version, where you can play a circle (i.e. a piece) at any arbitrary position within a larger circle (i.e. the board), so that the pieces may partially overlap to varying degrees. This variant of the game could be more casual and faster paced, appealing to many mobile gamers, while also offering a high level of strategic depth for strategy enthusiasts who want a way to pass time on their phones. Of course, this is just one idea for a mobile game - the possibilities are limitless.

Computer Science, AI/ML

Nick

Optimizing a state-of-the-art k-medoids algorithm in C++

We've developed a state-of-the-art clustering algorithm for the k-medoids problem (similar to k-means, but where the cluster centers must be actual datapoints). Our work was accepted to Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2020. We have also released a Python package, written in C++, to enable others to use our algorithm. We are looking for someone to optimize this package. Experience with multithreading, caches, and profiling code is a plus.

AI/ML

Let's play "Guess the Artist"!

Different musical genres lend themselves to different types of lyrics. For example, a Christian rock band is probably going to sing about different things than a Country-Western singer. What if we could predict who sings a song based on their lyrics? Using natural language processing (NLP) AI algorithms, we can train a model to identify certain artists based on their lyrics. Using Python and Scikit-learn, these models can take lyrics from a song and predict the singer with surprising accuracy. This project could even be extended to create new song lyrics for a certain artist!

Computer Science, AI/ML

Kyle

Let's build a Google Translate model for a rare language!

In this project, we can literally bring a language to (digital) life by creating a translation model from scratch and releasing it to the public at the end. We will be using the state-of-the-art Machine Learning (ML) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to train and tune our models for performance. Very importantly, we will explore the scarce resources around this rare languages by connecting with the community of speakers, finding online resources, and creating datasets that NLP models can digest. Main learning objectives from the project would be to understand the role and importance of data science, gain practical knowledge on how to use and improve NLP models and evaluate our results in the real world! I expect a lot of fun and discovery in the process!

Computer Science, AI/ML

Jam

Thinking about minds

When we look out at the world, we can immediately tell which kinds of things have "minds" and which ones don't. (We'd be shocked if the garbage can started moving itself across the floor.) What's more, we have beliefs about what kinds of minds others have --- e.g., toddlers can have desires but can't think rationally; bugs seem to feel less pain than dogs and cats. These are incredible inferences to make: Humans are the only creatures on earth that are capable of thinking this way. In this project, we'll start off by reading and discussing papers about how people make these kinds of judgments, and we'll work towards developing a project. We could even run a study together and analyze the data! I'm open to whatever your interests might be --- we can do some research, or we can do something totally new.

Philosophy, Psychology, AI/ML, Cognitive

Madeline

Robot Ball: Using AI to predict sports outcomes

In this project, we will leverage AI computing tools to develop a better read on sports game outcomes. We'll gather all sorts of data – from player stats to past game results and even the day's weather – and let customized AI algorithms sort out the patterns. The goal is to make game predictions more accurate and give us a solid data-backed edge over just following hunches.

Neuroscience, AI/ML, Cognitive

Brock

Signals on the Human Body

In this project, you will do a literature review to see what kinds of signals are being measured from the human body in routine clinical care, or promising ideas for new types of measurements. You will pick one (or two) and do a deeper dive on what that signal looks like, what it measures and how to extract meaningful information from it. For example, you can pick the electrocardiogram, and write a review on what doctors use it for, or build a device using components (like Arduino) on the web, or I can send you examples to analyze using Python or Matlab in some way.

AI/ML, Medicine

Andreas

Learn to fly a quadrotor

Use existing implementations of reinforcement learning algorithms to understand a specific robotics task - in simulation for now. I will start with lessons on robotics, then have a student implement key lines from state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms to see what does and does not work. This is labelled as advanced because reinforcement learning builds on many topics in machine learning and python, so you should be comfortable in python and have an idea what machine learning is before starting.

AI/ML

Nathan

Morality + artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence is becoming a part of our social world. What does this mean for morality? In this project, we'll read and discuss papers concerning people's beliefs and judgments concerning AI (e.g., self-driving cars, humanoid robots). Then, we'll figure out which area you're most interested in. For example, what do children think about robots? Does this differ from adults? Do people think that robots have minds? We'll develop a project together, based on your interests. This could involve whatever you want it to! We could run an experiment, analyze data, and write a paper; we could put together a podcast and interview experts across moral philosophy and psychology. This is one of my favorite topics, and I'd love to work on something cool together.

Philosophy, Psychology, AI/ML, Cognitive

Madeline

Data Analysis

Discovering, examining, and drawing conclusions from a large, potentially messy or unstructured dataset you are excited about.

AI/ML

Kelly

Changes in Public Perception of COVID-19 Pandemic

How has public sentiment about COVID-19 changed since the beginning of the Biden administration? This project would analyze a selection of popular threads and comments in the social media community /r/coronavirus, seeking to identify thematic changes and content exemplars through the period of executive transition to the present. This research would be beneficial for public health advocacy, science communication, and political organizing.

AI/ML, Public Health, Business

Ian

Engineering drugs for SARS-CoV-2

You will learn how to go through the drug design process and propose drugs that could be effective to treat SARS-CoV-2. You will summarize your findings in a research paper.

Biotech, Physics, Chemistry, AI/ML, Business

Jesus

Baseball Swing Detection

Often, athletes find that human observation and input is necessary to assess the quality of their "game". Baseball players, golfers, or tennis players without personal trainers and thousands of dollars of equipment might be stuck trying to guess what went wrong with that last swing and how they can improve. Motivated by this, we can consider building a system that uses computer vision to help athletes improve their "game".

Computer Science, Math, AI/ML, Statistics

Emaan

Identifying Bots on Social Media

This is an intermediate natural language processing project that involves using data about users to predict if they are a bot. This field is growing quickly and there are a lot of directions this project could go in. Requires familiarity with: - Any programming language (Python is preferred) - Basic machine learning

Computer Science, Math, AI/ML

Sahil

Is this a cat? (Machine Learning)

Build a simple neural network with Python and Tensorflow to identify whether a picture is a cat or a non-cat (or any animal of your choice!). Learn how to balance bias and variance to optimize your model for accuracy.

Computer Science, AI/ML, Public Health

Audra

Review of Legged Robot Morphologies

Given the extensive variations in quadruped robot morphologies in both research and commercial platforms (think Boston Dynamics Spot vs ETH Zurich ANYmal), let's explore how the different hardware designs affect performance and types of tasks. This project will involve a review of the hardware design decisions from a selection of some of the most influential quadruped platforms and an analysis on how different configurations affect the robot dynamics.

Engineering, Computer Science, AI/ML

William

What does a galaxy sound like?

[Data Sonification] How can galactic properties (e.g. mass, temperature, composition) be turned into meaningful sound bites for quick comparisons?

AI/ML

David

AI for Climate Change

Recent years have seen an explosion of advancements in AI, and the climate and environmental sciences have only begun to adopt these latest methods. Several avenues for projects exist based on student interest in learning certain AI methods (computer vision, natural language processing (NLP), time series methods with transformers) and the climate domain of interest (wildfire, heatwaves, ecosystem impacts, climate justice). Some potential examples include: 1) Using computer vision models to classify wildfire smoke plumes from satellite imagery 2) Using computer vision 'super-resolution' models to enhance the spatial resolution of climate forecasts 3) Time series forecasting of variables like temperature or water levels 4) Natural language processing (NLP) models like BERT applied to classifying climate change misinformation in text data Learning outcomes would include 1) Experience doing an end-to-end data science project on real-world data 2) In-depth knowledge of a particular AI model/algorithm, 2) Python coding experience implementing, training, and fine-tuning the model. A variety of project outcomes are possible, with the most common being a research paper. Prerequisites: Some experience with Python programming. Prior AI coursework experience not expected.

AI/ML

Tristan

Is this "statistically significant" ?

This project will teach some introduction statistics concepts (what does "statistically significant" REALLY mean? what does it NOT mean?). We will work with a publicly available dataset to understand and apply concepts of data analysis and hypothesis testing.

Math, AI/ML, Statistics

Ivy

Simplifying Fiery Reactions with Data

I spearheaded an exciting project called "Simplifying Fiery Reactions with Data" that aimed to make complex combustion simulations easier to understand and work with. Imagine a puzzle where you have to figure out how different things burn and react together. Well, in the world of science and engineering, we use special computer programs to simulate these reactions, which help us design better engines, create cleaner fuels, and even understand how fire behaves. But here's the catch: these simulations can be really complicated and time-consuming. That's where our project would come in! We will use tricks with data to make these simulations faster and simpler, like finding shortcuts in a maze. By doing this, we can unlock valuable insights into combustion and make it much easier for scientists and engineers to study and improve how things burn. It's like making a tough puzzle a whole lot easier to solve, and it's all about making our world safer, cleaner, and more efficient!

Physics, Computer Science, AI/ML, Business

Shervin