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.

People working on laptops
Computer Science

Supernova Light Curve Simulator

Project Description: The aim of this project is to develop an interactive simulator where users can model and visualize the light curve of a supernova explosion. A supernova light curve represents the brightness of the explosion as a function of time. By utilizing coding, students can understand and visualize the physical processes and variables that affect the light curves of different types of supernovae. Research: Start with an introduction to supernovae: What are they? What causes them? What are the different types of supernovae? Deep dive into the concept of light curves: What are they, and why are they important in astrophysics? Coding: Use Python, particularly the libraries like Matplotlib for plotting, and Tkinter or PyQt for GUI development. Develop a basic GUI where users can: * Choose different types of supernovae. * Adjust key parameters like explosion energy, progenitor star mass, distance from Earth, etc. * Visualize the resulting light curve on a graph.

Physics, Computer Science, Math

Candice
Candice

Outcome Analysis of Surgical Interventions

By using publicly available data, we can evaluate the effects of multiple variables of interest on surgical outcomes, based on your own clinical interest. Ultimately, we could assess how the presence of co-morbidities (ex: diabetes, hypertension, etc) or demographic variables (ex: sex, age, socioeconomic status, etc) affect outcomes of a given surgical intervention (ex: gastric bypass, hip fracture, etc). This project can be applicable to a variety of fields and can be tailored towards your own passions!

Neuroscience, Computer Science, Social Science, Statistics

Megan
Megan

Use of Data Science / Stats techniques to answer interesting questions

What makes a popular song popular? What identifies fake news from real news? There are data everywhere and I am excited to help students apply stats and data science techniques to help answer questions like these and many more!

Engineering, Computer Science

Won
Won

Computer Generated Doodles

In this project, you will write a program to create computer generated art. The project deliverable will be a static webpage displaying your favorite art pieces with a blog describing the process. Together, we will learn about different algorithms to generate 2D images from random walks to using procedural textures like Perlin noise.

Computer Science

Isabel
Isabel

Exploratory Research Paper

Deepfakes, Voice mimic attacks, etc. are all made possible because of the leakage of personal information. But what type of data is needed to implement such an attack? How much information about an individual is needed? More importantly, where does this data come from? Project formation: chose a motivating attack (i.e. voice cloning, face cloning, motion cloning) and perform a literature review to determine what type of data is needed to mount the attack. Then explore where this information can be collected from: examine common application/systems that might collect this type of data and investigate its security/privacy policies. This project is most likely thought of in terms of facial recognition, where photos can be easily scraped from public profile photos on the web. But where might systems collect voice data? motion data (i.e mimicking an individual's walk)? Even data capturing how a person speaks (what words, phrases, etc. represent them and their writing style) In this project you will write a research paper identifying and exploring in-depth an area of current privacy concern. You will gain skills reading top-tier research papers and discovering how to *independently* find a research are of interest. This project can easily be expanded in scope for future projects.

Arts, Engineering, Computer Science, AI/ML

Josephine
Josephine

Start a podcast

Do you have a podcast idea but are not sure where to start? Let's flesh out your idea and set you in the right direction to go from idea to launch.

Computer Science, Business

Melissa
Melissa

What can we learn from classical music?

Classical music spans multiple centuries, each with their own unique styles. This can make it quite fun to ask some questions using machine learning and statistical approaches: (1) Can we find out who composed a piece by looking at it? By hearing it? (2) What makes a composer famous? Is there anything similar about music across centuries? (3) Can computers make music that is as good as a trained composer?

Biology, Computer Science, AI/ML, Statistics

Nikhil
Nikhil

Electrical Engineering - Systems Exploration (data / energy)

Ever wonder clicking a button on your mouse turns into an action on the computer screen? How we start with wind turbines and arrive at your cell phone or computer battery? In this project, you will explore an application from top to bottom and understand the entire electronic ecosystem. You will get to see all the complex parts and systems involved and gain appreciation for the diverse skills. You will learn parts of the engineering process and about tradeoffs and decisions made. The final project will include a survey of the learnings as well as a more detailed case study about one segment of the stack. This is a great exploration for an aspiring electrical engineer! Requirements - High school algebra - High school physics preferred - Calculus optional

Engineering, Computer Science

Bob
Bob

Looking inside the black box: why machine learning works

When we read about machine learning in media, it's often presented as a black box; that is, data goes in, the computer does some magic, and out comes a recommendation for which socks you will find most comfortable. While it is true that machine learning algorithms must be complex to solve complex problems, with a little bit of work, we can develop a remarkably deep understanding for why certain models behave as they do. Together, my student and I can pick a problem that we think machine learning might be able to offer a solution to. We can explore a variety of methods, experiment with them to see which may offer the best results, and dive into some theory to understand why we are seeing the results that we observe. At the end of our time together I hope that my student will have developed some experience with programming, will have learned some mathematics that they likely won't encounter again until they reach university and will be able to explain the core idea behind several machine learning methods. I would like to conclude our time together by authoring a technical piece of writing (or preparing a technical presentation) which encapsulates the work that we have done together.

Physics, Computer Science, Math, AI/ML

Mark
Mark

Game Time!

Through Greenfoot, create a game with a topic and theme of your choice that conveys a story that can be used to educate others. Some previous coding experience is preferred but it does not to have to be with Greenfoot specifically. We will be able to publish the game on Greenfoot upon project completion.

Computer Science, Math, Public Health, Statistics

Shae
Shae

From "Hello World" to "PWNed"

Teaching Programming can be easy and fun. With this project I aim to introduce students to computer programming through Python and various cool hacking projects that will get them started with programming, teach them about how computers works, and introductory cybersecurity and hacking. By the end of the project the students will be proficient in using the Linux terminal, scripting and building tooling that will help them progress in the future.

Computer Science

George
George

Modeling the spread of an infectious disease (e.g., COVID-19)

In this project, we will learn about mathematical modeling and its diverse applications in epidemiology. Pertinent questions may be: Which infectious disease should we model (i.e., the “big picture” context)? What is the nature of the data we are provided with (i.e., exploratory data analyses)? What are the various types of modeling frameworks available to us (i.e., model paradigm)? On what levels can models be compared (i.e., model comparison)? Which steps should be taken to ensure the accuracy of our model (i.e., model checking)? The chosen paths of exploration will depend on the student’s interests. Final Notes: If you have a particular idea for a project in mind, I am happy to guide you throughout your journey. Intellectual curiosity is a vital component of the research process!

Computer Science, Math, Statistics

Abhishek
Abhishek

Covid-19 Data set Analyzer

In this project you will use a OOP language such as Java to create a Covid-19 data set analyzer that parses the given data set and computes insightful information such as deaths per capita in the given zipcode, vaccination rates per capita, etc. You will learn how to create this project using N-tier architecture (data, processor, and ui tiers) and writing your own CSV parser from scratch. In the end, you will test your hypothesis against your analysis using the information you have gathered.

Computer Science

Thomas
Thomas

A Comprehensive Analysis of Passwords

You probably see that many websites like facebook, or amazon require certain password requirements like "Must contain one capital letter, a symbol, a number, etc.". How can this data be used against them? Using some form of rule induction, pattern recognition, or machine learning, as well as one of the many datasets of password leaks available online, find the patterns in how people choose passwords, and how those can be protected. For instance, if people are using a capital letter does, it often appear at the beginning of the password? How often are passwords just English words, as opposed to a random set of characters?

Computer Science, AI/ML

Hirsh
Hirsh

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
Sahil

Kaggle Competition

For this project, the student and I will explore either active or past Kaggle competitions and challenges. Kaggle competitions are machine learning tasks made by Kaggle or other companies like Google or WHO. This is a great way to practice machine learning skills and diverse problem-solving. Kaggle competitions are highly regarded in the industry and will look great on a resume. I will help facilitate the competition but encourage independent thinking and creativity.

Computer Science, Math

Michal
Michal

The Untold Power of a Cloud

Taking pictures of the clouds around me each day for a month, I was able to build a cloud atlas. I then analyzed each photo to see what kind of clouds were present and then what that meant about the atmosphere on that day. In my final research paper, I also included the history of cloud atlases and their purpose in Meteorology.

Psychology, Computer Science, Math

Emma
Emma

Simulating the Stock Market with Monte Carlo Models

This is a beginner-to-intermediate statistics and programming project centered around Monte Carlo simulations. Monte Carlo simulations are random methods for modeling the outcome of a complicated process. These methods are used in finance all the time, so this project explores an early look at how we can use code to "simulate" the stock market. Requires familiarity with: - Statistics - Basic finance - Basic programming (any language)

Computer Science, Math, AI/ML

Sahil
Sahil

Building a Predictive Machine Learning Model (Beginners)

Building a Machine Learning Model that makes predictions about something that interests you. For example, given an image of sheet music, a model that classifies the composer or artist.

Computer Science, Math, AI/ML

Dina
Dina

[Finance] Understanding stock market. How to become a successful trader.

Ever dreamed of working for yourself? Look no further than trading. It can be scary to lose money, but with the right tools and knowledge you can reach financial independence early in your life. Happy to share my path and help you reach the sky!

Computer Science, Business

Andrei
Andrei