Project suggestions for CS 4033/5033 Fall 2007

The following list of project suggestions is intended to get your project ideas started. Please feel free to come up with your own project ideas as well! Also, feel free to take one of these projects and modify it. Examine the previous year's suggestions for even more project ideas.

Storm morphology classification

• Classifying storms as severe or non-severe (and then refining the categories) is a critical problem for meteorologists. The correct classification can impact the prediction of severe weather and can be used to retrospectively evaluate performance of severe weather warnings. At the conference on artificial intelligence at this year's annual American Meteorological Society meeting, there is a student contest (with monetary prizes!) on storm morphology classifcation. Here are further details!

Understanding the dynamics of severe storms

• I have over 6 TB of simulated supercell thunderstorms available for study. I have several research projects using this data already and am quite open to ideas. Suitable machine learning project ideas include learning bayesian networks to predict storm dynamics (likely a dynamic bayesian network), learning decision trees to predict a particular aspect of storm classification, learning a probability model of how storms move, etc. Talk to me for more ideas if you are interested!

Understanding student retention at OU

• Why do some students stay in college or in their chosen major despite the obstacles they may run into and other students leave or quickly switch majors? What factors affect these choices? We have many years worth of data about students at OU and their actual retention statistics. This data has been studied in a previous ML class project (look at the reports from 2005) but can be extended. If you are interested in this data, talk to me asap.

Bions

• The bions represent an exciting collaboration between art and science. To see pictures and movies, I highly suggest the following page.
• Projects with the bions would involve coding on the actual bions. The processors can run c code and you have a limit of 8K of code with only 1K of memory! An interesting limitation for an ML algorithm and one that will require your creativity to work with!
• Potential projects include: learning to change the song so as to attract the viewers and to retain them once they arrive, modeling neurons, hebbian learning, and many more.

Blimp

• Projects with the blimp are similar to projects with the helicopter except that the blimp is less dangerous (no rotating blades!). All control would still need to be performed off-board. The blimp has a PTZ camera attached.

This page written by amcgovern [at] ou.edu.

Last updated: May 23, 2016 1:59 PM