2015 Projects
Sophie Guo, Math/PoliSci major, Bridget Dou, ECE/CompSci major, Sachet Bangia, Econ/CompSci major, and Christy Vaughn spent ten weeks studying different procedures for drawing congressional boundaries, and quantifying the effects of these procedures on the fairness of actual election results. Project Results There has already been research done with North Carolina districts, described in http://today.duke.edu/2014/10/mathofredistricting. There, Jonathan...
Sharrin Manor, Arjun Devarajan, Wuming Zhang, and Jeffrey Perkins explored a lage collection of imagery data provided by the U.S. Geological Survey, with the goal of identifying solar panels using image recognition. They worked closely with the Energy Data Analytics Lab, part of the Energy Initiative at Duke. Project Results The students coded their own proof-of-principle algorithm which identified...
Yanmin (Mike) Ma, mathematics/economics major, and Manchen (Mercy) Fang, electrical and computer engineering/computer science major, spent ten weeks studying historical archives and building a model to predict the price of pigs, relative to a number of interesting factors. Project Results Berkshire pig transaction price is influenced by factors including the age of...
David Clancy, a Stats/Math/EnvSci major, and Tianyi Mu, an ECE/CompSci major, spent ten weeks studying the effects of weather, surroundings, and climate on the operational behavior of water reservoirs across the United States. They used a large dataset compiled by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and they worked closely with Lauren...
Luke Raskopf, PoliSci major and Xinyi (Lucy) Lu, Stats/CompSci major, spent ten weeks investigating the effectiveness of policies to combat unemployment and wage stagnation faced by working and middle-class families in the State of North Carolina. They worked closely with Allan Freyer at the North Carolina Justice Center. Project Results The team used regression and...
Joy Patel (Math and CompSci) and Hans Riess (Math) spent ten weeks analyzing massive amounts of simulated weather data supplied by Spectral Sciences Inc. Their goal was to investigate ways in which advanced mathematical techniques could assist in quantifying storm intensity, helping to augment today’s more qualitatively-based methods. Project Results: The team used...
Paclitaxel (Taxol) is a small molecule drug belonging to the taxane family. It is one of the most commonly used chemotherapeutics, used for treatment of many cancers, as a monotherapy or in combination with other drugs to treat breast, lung and ovarian cancer as well as Kaposi’s sarcoma. Taxol is on the World Health Organization’s (WHO) List...
Molly Rosenstein, an Earth and Ocean Sciences major and Tess Harper, an Environmental Science and Spanish major spent ten weeks developing interactive data applications for use in Environmental Science 101, taught by Rebecca Vidra. Project Results The team created 6 applications, including ones on climate change and mountaintop mining, and tested them out on the entire...
Undergraduate students Ellie Burton (BioPhysics/Math, Johns Hopkins University), Kevin Kuo (Electrical and Computer Engineering), and GiSeok Choi (Electrical and Computer Engineering/Math) joined a research group led by Douglas Boyer and Professor Ingrid Daubechies, testing and developing mathematical and statistical methodology for measuring similarities between bones and teeth. Faculty Lead: Ingris...
The goal of this project is take a large amount of data from the Massive Open Online Courses offered by Duke professors, and produce from it a coherent and compelling data analysis challenge that might then be used for a Duke or nation-wide data analysis competition. We hope to select...
Kelsey Sumner, EvAnth and Global Health major and Christopher Hong, CompSci/ECE major, spent ten weeks analyzing high-dimensional microRNA data taken from patients with viral and/or bacterial conditions. They worked closely with the medical faculty and practitioners who generated the data. Project Results The team used statistics and machine learning to distinguish between viral...
Kang Ni, Math/Econ major, Kehan Zhang, Econ/Stats/ major, and Alex Hong, spent ten weeks investigating a large collection of grocery store transaction data. They worked closely with Matt Harding Behavioral Economics and Healthy Food Choice Research Center. (BECR Center). Project Results The team used clustering techniques to identify distinct sets of products, a...
Ethan Levine, Annie Tang, and Brandon Ho spent ten weeks investigating whether personality traits can be used to predict how people make risky decisions. They used a large dataset collected by the lab of Prof. Scott Huettel, and were mentored by graduate students Emma Wu Dowd and Jonathan Winkle. Project Results The team...
Spenser Easterbrook, a Philosophy and Math double major, joined Biology majors Aharon Walker and Nicholas Branson in a ten-week exploration of the connections between journal publications from the humanities and the sciences. They were guided by Rick Gawne and Jameson Clarke, graduate students from Philosophy and Biology. Project Results The team painstakingly created citation networks for several major...
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