Project Proposals

[lukas-braun]

Please add your project proposals as a comment

[lukas-braun]

What is the idea?
Select a topic from (neuroscience inspired) machine learning (like STDP, phase plane analysis, ...) and to create and try to publish an article on distill.pub.

What is distill.pub?
Distill.pub is a peer reviewed online journal, which attempts to reduce "research debt": https://distill.pub/2017/research-debt/ It was heavily inspired by "Explorable Explanations" (https://explorabl.es/), an attempt to make difficult concepts accessible through interactive visualizations in the web. Look through some of the articles, they are beautiful: https://distill.pub/

Advantages

• We could investigate, prepare and implement a scientific topic in depth
• If we succeed, our work would result in a citable publication (some of the recently published articles on distill.pub have >200 citations)
• There is a $10.000 price for good submissions (https://distill.pub/prize/)
• Distill articles are read by tens of thousands of people

Disadvantages

• Project would include a lot of java-script coding
• Project would include a lot of writing in addition to the coding

[DorotheaMueller]

Key idea
The key idea is to write code that is actually useful for other people, thus making an impact on the long run (coding for social good).

Inspiration
One possibility would be to do something similar to Code for Germany. Their aim is to make useful applications from public data. Projects range from showing accessibility of BVG stations for people in wheelchairs, maps for finding recycling places or where to get food directly from farmers to a tool which enables to directly compare election programmes for specific topics.

Advantages

• Includes different challenges (data scraping, visualization, analysis)
• Focus is on engineering, not primarily on optimization

Disadvantages

• might also include a lot of java-script coding

[marcbue]

What is the idea?
Create an App for saving Bees! Apparently the population of bees has declined dramatically in the last years. A friend of a friend wants to propose to a NGO with a project for creating an App which might help saving Bees in the future. The Idea is that people can take photos of vegetation (e.g. flowers) while they are outside and in combination with their location (e.g. via Google Maps) information can be extracted where bees could potentially live. Apparently the color alone already indicates whether a bee can live there or not. Additional usage of "Image recognition" for getting information about the actual flower is even more helpful.

It might be compared to https://mundraub.org/. Where people give information about fruit trees for people to get free fruits anywhere.

Advantages

• App Development makes it easy to distribute workloads across different teams (design, backend, frontend, algorithms...)
• A good Cause!

Disadvantages

• Since the project is not even proposed yet it might actually never come to fruit, though the chances are high with an actual app.
• There needs to be additional communication with the "Inventor" of the idea. (I don't know her yet either)

[marcbue]

What is the idea?
A lot of companies get bills in form of pdfs where they have to manually extract information from and put them by hand in their respective software tools (e.g. excel). We might think of possible ways for them to automatize this for them (e.g. setting up a local server where they can upload the bills on a webpage in their intranet and there is an interface to their bookkeeping software, an app for taking a photo/scanning the bill and directly upload it to a server...) .

Advantages

• A lot of freedom to think about a possible architecture to solve this problem --> possible easy distribution of workload
• Might be able to earn some money while doing this
• Possibility to make a business case out of this

Disadvantages

• Private companies as partners - lots of negotiations, high responsibility, legal obligations....

[gabelstein]

Key idea
Specifying a project for Dorothea's approach:
Develop and deploy enhancements for a mobile-friendly web app that matches needy individuals seeking knowledge services--English classes, US citizenship classes, or legal aid--with volunteers willing to help.

Advantages

Full software project with frontend and backend.

Disadvantages

Mostly javascript on frontend.

Further Information
https://app.code4socialgood.org/project/view/1722
https://tutoria.io/

[DorotheaMueller]

What is the idea?
Have you ever wanted to go to a cinema on the weekend and it was an annoying process to visit several websites in order to figure out which cinema shows which movie at what times? Especially considering several smaller, independent cinemas this process is annoying. The idea is to make a website/app that pulls and combines the schedules of different cinemas in Berlin, so you can filter for different aspects (e.g., language, OV, day) and limit your search time. The website could additionally contain a map (where the cinemas are) or, if we have time, small analysis what the cinemas usually show (which language, ...)

Advantages

• actually useful application
• involves different aspects of engineering (scraping, frontend, backend, if we want analysis)

Disadvantages

• find sever where we can run the website on (and which pulls schedules from different websites)

[owenmackwood]

Regarding the cinema suggestion: Great idea. Unfortunately it already exists.

[lukas-braun]

What is the idea?
Implement an open-world, open-end, multiplayer strategy game with very simple 2d graphics (colourful, moving dots) but rich multi-agent systems and crowd dynamics. Each player would play an ant colony. Incentives would include finding and harvesting food, growing the population of the ant colony, branching the colony and expanding over the map, fighting and defeating other ant colonies.

Advantages

• Huge amount of distributable tasks: Networking, crowd dynamics, multi-agent system AI, graphics, game design, balancing, automated testing of game dynamics ...
• Games are fun

Disadvantages

• It's a game, no real world usage

[Zainab-Mohamed]

What is the idea?
What about checking one of Kaggle competitions? It's very well-known competition in machine learning.
https://www.kaggle.com/competitions

Advantages

• It's on machine learning, which might be interesting for many people.
• Mostly we will use python

Disadvantages

• Not sure about how the tasks will be distributed, and whether it will be big enough project for the whole class.