12th Biology Project Ideas

[Jeff]

This12-unit course provides an introduction to many of the great ideas that have formed the foundation for the transformation of the life sciences into a fully-fledged computational discipline. This gateway course is intended as a first exposure to computational biology for first-year undergraduates in the School of Computer Science, although it is open to other quantitatively and computationally capable students who are interested in exploring the field. By completing this course, students will encounter a handful of fundamental algorithmic approaches deriving straight from very widely cited primary literature, much of which has been published in recent years. The course also introduces basic concepts in statistics, mathematics, and machine learning necessary to understand these approaches. Many of the ideas central to modern computational biology have resulted in widely used software that is applied to analyze (often very large) biological datasets; an important feature of the course is that students will be exposed to this software in the context of compelling biological problems.

Data science is a profession that requires a variety of scientific tools, processes, algorithms and knowledge extraction systems that are used to identify meaningful patterns in structured and unstructured data alike.

If you fancy data science and are eager to get a solid grip on the technology, now is as good a time as ever to hone your skills to comprehend and manage the upcoming challenges facing the profession. The purpose behind this article is to share some practicable ideas for your next project, which will not only boost your confidence in data science but also play a critical part in enhancing your skills.

Chatbots play a pivotal role for businesses as they can effortlessly without any slowdown. They automate a majority of the customer service process, single-handedly reducing the customer service workload. The chatbots utilize a variety of techniques backed with artificial intelligence, machine learning and data science.

Chatbots analyze the input from the customer and reply with an appropriate mapped response. To train the chatbot, you can use recurrent neural networks with the intents JSON dataset, while the implementation can be handled using Python. Whether you want your chatbot to be domain-specific or open-domain depends on its purpose. As these chatbots process more interactions, their intelligence and accuracy also increase.

Have you ever wondered how media platforms like YouTube, Netflix and others recommend what to watch next? They use a tool called the recommender/recommendation system. It takes several metrics into consideration, such as age, previously watched shows, most-watched genre and watch frequency, and it feeds them into a machine learning model that then generates what the user might like to watch next.

Based on your preferences and input data, you can try to build either a content-based recommendation system or a collaborative filtering recommendation system. For this project, you can use R with the MovieLens data set, which covers ratings for over 58,000 movies. As for the packages, you can use recommenderlab, ggplot2, reshap2 and data.table.

Data analysis starts with exploratory data analysis (EDA). It plays a key role in the data analysis process as it helps you make sense of your data and often involves visualizing them for better exploration. For visualization, you can pick from a range of options, including histograms, scatterplots or heat maps. EDA can also expose unexpected results and outliers in your data. Once you have identified the patterns and derived the necessary insights from your data, you are good to go.

For this project, you can implement convolutional neural networks and use Python with the OpenCV package. You can grab the Adience dataset for this project. Factors such as makeup, lighting and facial expressions will make this challenging and try to throw your model off, so keep that in mind.

This project involves identifying and extracting emotions from multiple sound files containing human speech. To make something like this in Python, you can use the Librosa, SoundFile, NumPy, Scikit-learn, and PyAaudio packages. For the data set, you can use the Ryerson Audio-Visual Database of Emotional Speech and Song (RAVDESS), which contains over 7300 files.

Modern businesses strive by delivering highly personalized services to their customers, which would not be possible without some form of customer categorization or segmentation. In doing so, organizations can easily structure their services and products around their customers while targeting them to drive more revenue.

For this project, you will use unsupervised learning to group your customers into clusters based on individual aspects such as age, gender, region, interests, and so on. K-means clustering or hierarchical clustering are suitable here, but you can also experiment with fuzzy clustering or density-based clustering methods. You can use the Mall_Customers data set as sample data.

To start a data science project, first decide what sort of data science project you want to undertake, such as data cleaning, data analysis or data visualization. Then, find a good dataset on a website like data.world or data.gov. From there, you can analyze the data and communicate your results.

Neuroscience has many different fields of study that you can dive into (e.g., cognitive, clinical). Since neuroscience research often requires expensive equipment to measure different parts of the brain and the body, the project ideas in this article will focus primarily on literature reviews, which you can do from anywhere.

A literature review is a synthesis of key work that has been conducted about a topic over several years. Doing the research to conduct a literature review will deepen your understanding of your chosen neuroscience topic. You can present your research in a written report, YouTube video, blog post, podcast, or any other medium you want!

Exercising is important, and it has many physical and psychological benefits. Investigate the academic literature to understand how exercise affects chemicals in the brain and body. Then, conduct an experiment to determine if it is helpful to exercise before studying for an exam. For example, you could randomly assign half your participants to run for 10 minutes before studying for a short test, and instruct the other half of your participants to sit still for 10 minutes before studying. Give the participants a test immediately after studying and then 3 days later. Which group does better?

We make so many decisions everyday, and almost every decision carries some degree of uncertainty. Past research has heavily focused on studying decision-making behavior by examining group averages (which assumes that all people generally adopt similar decision strategies). However, there has been a recent shift towards understanding individual differences, which better appreciates the fact that people may employ decision-making strategies that are fundamentally different from other people's strategies. This project aims at understanding people's unique decision-making strategies when people have uncertainty about which decision will result in the best outcome.

The use of medical marijuana for treating a variety of neurological conditions, such as chronic pain, autism spectrum disorders, and even Alzheimer's disease is becoming increasingly popular. On the other hand, studies have suggested that chronic marijuana use, especially during adolescence, predisposes individuals to mental health disorders. In this project, you will explore academic literature on the use of marijuana as a treatment for neurological disorders. Next, you will research the adverse effects of marijuana use, especially during adolescence. You can create a podcast, powerpoint presentation, or YouTube video to be shared with high school students, counselors, or other organizations.

One of the coolest and most widely used techniques in neuroscience research today is optogenetics, which gives us the ability to control the activity of brain cells with a flash of light! In this project, you will research: How light-sensitive proteins were discovered and the basic principles of how they work in genetically-modified neurons; How optogenetics is used in research experiments to answer different types of questions in neuroscience; Some of the most important scientific discoveries from optogenetics and how optogenetics has changed the way we think about the brain.

Take a deep dive into stem cell research to gain a thorough understanding of the techniques and considerations involved. An induced pluripotent stem cell is an immature cell that is generated from an adult (mature) cell and that has regained the capacity to differentiate into any type of cell in the body. Do research into the ethical and scientific underpinnings of stem cell research and its medicinal uses. Once done, you will use your findings to write a review paper

Doctors often prescribe medications for people who have issues going to or staying asleep. However, many of these medications have mixed efficacy, and it is unknown exactly what they do. In this project ,you can investigate a currently prescribed drug/substance for sleep, such as ambien or melatonin. Research how the drug affects the brain, how effective it is, how it should be taken for maximum effect, and other details. If interested, you could also investigate potential treatments (e.g., endocannabinoids) that could be ground-breaking or have better results than the current medications. To complement your literature review, you could also conduct a survey to determine if sleep medications are helping people sleep.

In this project, you will investigate the history of therapeutic human gene editing, what therapeutic gene technologies are available or are currently being developed, and which conditions these tools are being used to treat. You may choose to focus more broadly on the history and current status of human gene editing tools and therapy, or focus more closely on a specific gene/condition pair that has been or could be explored for gene therapy (e.g., sickle cell disease, cystic fibrosis).

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