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Browse project ideas by Polygence mentors
What is cartilage made of, and why is it important?
Cartilage is a fascinating tissue! It contains unique components structured in a specific way to help it function, cushioning our joints for over 60 years. How is this possible?
Biotech, Engineering
How healthy is the new cartilage tissue which grows to repair an injury?
Cartilage is a unique tissue in that unlike most others, it does not contain blood vessels to facilitate repair after injury. However, after injury, especially after surgical repair, some new tissue may grow. But is this cartilage the same as it was before injury? Does it have the same components, and structure?
Biotech, Engineering
How do sports injuries affect the incidence rate of arthritis?
Sports injuries are increasingly common; we all know of someone who has torn an ACL or meniscus. But how does that injury affect a persons orthopedic health years down the line? Does the type of repair surgery result in a different outcome? What strategies could be used to study this?
Biotech, Engineering
How money is created and destroyed.
Exploring our country's financial plumbing and understanding how inflation is caused.
Finance, Business
Evaluating the Perception of Fairness
This proposed study explores whether adolescents and adults differ in how strictly they judge violations of arbitrary institutional rules, like school dress codes, compared to standard social norms. Using an online platform like Qualtrics, participants will read randomized vignettes about different rule-breaking scenarios and rate the violation's severity, the rule's legitimacy, and the rule-breaker's competence on a 1-to-7 scale. The resulting behavioral data can then be analyzed using foundational statistical tests—such as t-tests or ANOVAs in R or SPSS—to pinpoint any significant differences across age groups and conditions. This research will provide insight into the cognitive boundaries of human rule-following, revealing how developmental stages shape our deference to constructed institutional authority versus fundamental social norms.
Social, Cognitive
Banach Tarski Paradox
Banach and Tarski devised an algorithm in 1924 to essentially copy a sphere without adding any new points. This leads to a whole host of other paradoxical ideas in math and logic. It would be a very interesting project to read the proof of the original theorem, explore some of its consequences, and the modern perspective that "fixes" the issue using measure theory, then use modern tools to address the paradox and all its variations.
Math, Statistics, Physics
Economic Research Project
Together, we will choose an area of economic research that the student is most interested in and produce economic research about it! For example let’s say a student is very curious fashion, we could conduct research together about the fashion industry and explore the underlying economic dimensions of the market.
Economics, Music, History
The Art of Linguistic Persuasion: Analyzing Rhetoric, Media Bias, and Public Discourse
In an era dominated by social media and news breaking by the minute, how a story is told often has a great deal of impact on public perception. This project is designed for students interested in Political Science, Journalism, Law, or Communications who want to investigate the power of language in the public sphere. Since the same set of facts can be framed in vastly different ways, we live in an era of “divergent realities” in media and government discourse. Drawing on my 33 years of experience in rhetorical analysis and my work as a professional editor, I will guide you through a systematic "deconstruction" of modern rhetoric in an area of your choice. We will look at how specific words, figurative language, narrative structures, and repetition of talking points can be used to persuade an audience to adopt or reject a point of view. In this project, we will examine: • The Rhetoric of Policy: Analyzing how different political factions use language to frame the same issue. • Narrative and Dehumanization: Exploring the historical and contemporary link between media descriptions and the real-world treatment of marginalized groups. • The Mechanics of Disinformation: Identifying the linguistic bias and misinformation. How do "loaded" words and logical fallacies shape our understanding of government and society? The Outcome: The student will produce a rigorous research paper or a comparative discourse analysis. This project is ideal for students who want to develop the analytical tools necessary for careers in law, public policy, or international relations, proving they can navigate complex societal data with objectivity and insight.
Creative Writing, Literature
The Art of Linguistic Persuasion: Analyzing Rhetoric, Media Bias, and Public Discourse
In an era dominated by social media and news breaking by the minute, how a story is told often has a great deal of impact on public perception. This project is designed for students interested in Political Science, Journalism, Law, or Communications who want to investigate the power of language in the public sphere. Since the same set of facts can be framed in vastly different ways, we live in an era of “divergent realities” in media and government discourse. Drawing on my 33 years of experience in rhetorical analysis and my work as a professional editor, I will guide you through a systematic "deconstruction" of modern rhetoric in an area of your choice. We will look at how specific words, figurative language, narrative structures, and repetition of talking points can be used to persuade an audience to adopt or reject a point of view. In this project, we will examine: • The Rhetoric of Policy: Analyzing how different political factions use language to frame the same issue. • Narrative and Dehumanization: Exploring the historical and contemporary link between media descriptions and the real-world treatment of marginalized groups. • The Mechanics of Disinformation: Identifying the linguistic bias and misinformation. How do "loaded" words and logical fallacies shape our understanding of government and society? The student will produce a rigorous research paper or a comparative discourse analysis. This project is ideal for students who want to develop the analytical tools necessary for careers in law, public policy, or international relations, proving they can navigate complex societal data with objectivity and insight.
Creative Writing, Literature
Reinforcement Learning-Based Autonomous Navigation for a Raspberry Pi Robot Building a Low-Cost, Real-World Autonomous Driving Platform
Autonomous navigation is one of the most exciting and demanding challenges in robotics — requiring a system to perceive its environment, make decisions in real time, and recover gracefully from mistakes. In this project, we will design and build a small-scale autonomous driving robot on a Raspberry Pi platform, using reinforcement learning to teach the robot to navigate real-world environments without explicit programming. Starting from scratch, we will assemble the hardware, set up the sensing pipeline using onboard cameras and sensors, and train an RL agent that learns through trial and error to follow lanes, avoid obstacles, and make navigation decisions on the fly. A key focus of this project is bridging the gap between simulation-based training and real-world deployment — one of the hardest open problems in autonomous systems research. Final deliverable: A fully functional Raspberry Pi-based autonomous robot trained using reinforcement learning and tested in a real physical environment, along with a research paper documenting the hardware setup, RL training methodology, sim-to-real transfer strategies, performance results, and lessons learned for scaling to more complex autonomous systems.
AI/ML
