2,893 Inspirational Passion Project Ideas

Turn inspirations into your passion project.

This collection of project ideas, shared by Polygence mentors, is meant to help inspire student thinking about their own project. Students are in the driver seat of their research and are free to use any or none of the ideas shared by their mentors.

Check out some projects

Write a book

Do you have a book idea, but need help turning that idea into a published book? Let's work together on your book structure, and the various steps to self publish.

Computer Science, Business

Melissa

Computer Generated Doodles

In this project, you will write a program to create computer generated art. The project deliverable will be a static webpage displaying your favorite art pieces with a blog describing the process. Together, we will learn about different algorithms to generate 2D images from random walks to using procedural textures like Perlin noise.

Computer Science

Isabel

Using machine learning to predict disease mortality rates from publicly available data and identify potential public health interventions

The Center for Disease Control (CDC) maintains a database of underlying causes of death for each state (CDC Wonder: https://wonder.cdc.gov/ucd-icd10.html). By gathering additional data about individual states (e.g. smoking rate, occupation distribution, education levels, sales of certain products, weather patterns, etc), we can develop a machine learning model to predict death rates for a specific disease (e.g. lung cancer) or multiple diseases. The US government maintains many databases containing variables that can be used as predictors. Following the development of a machine learning model, the student researcher can perform statistical analyses to identify important predictors of the disease and propose potential public health interventions to reduce disease incidence. Students pursuing a project of this type will learn how to access publicly available public health databases, develop machine learning models in Python, and perform statistical analyses to identify significant predictors of disease.

Biotech, Biology, Computer Science, Statistics

Joshua

Scoring a Scene

I will guide the student through the process of scoring a sample scene from a film. I will help to come up with the initial idea for the scene and then guide the student through the process of arranging their piece of music, making sure to hit each moment of the scene.

Music, Arts, Computer Science

Cody

Investing in Novel Technology

The process of bringing a novel technology to patients or consumers often requires fundraising and financing in many stages. Starting from “seed” or “angel” rounds, followed by venture capital, crossover funding and eventually initial public offerings, each stages has its own unique benefits and challenges. Students will pick a promising technology in any industry, consider the costs associated with each stage of development, and estimate the capital the company would have to raise at each stage. Students will see the how landscape of early investors, venture capitalists, investment banks and other players specialize in these different fundraising stages to help business and entrepreneurs to succeed. The final project could be prospectus highlighting a technology to potential investors, or a business plan for a company at any stage.

Biotech, Computer Science, AI/ML

Daniel

Emerging Memory Technologies: which one is best for MY application?

This project would involve using architectural simulations to figure out which emerging memory technology would be appropriate in different application settings. Right now, this is an open problem that many people are trying to solve. A student attempting to complete this project, could instrument NVSim (https://github.com/SEAL-UCSB/NVSim) to test different architectural configurations and applications. In the end, the student should be able to make a convincing argument about which one makes the most sense for a few different applications. This project will require a good deal of technical expertise, math background, and a reasonable understanding of how computers work. A good background would involve AP courses in Calculus (at least AB) and Computer Science A, or equivalent knowledge. AP Statistics is helpful as well, but not necessary. The student will need to do a lot of background reading on their own to understand the nuances of this subject domain.

Physics, Computer Science, AI/ML

Akash

Randomized probabilistic consensus

You just had a massive burger and died. The guards at heaven give you 1 task: find a unique HSN (heaven security number) for yourself. They'll check on everyone in an hour, and anyone who does not have a unique HSN isn't going to heaven. An hour isn't long enough to coordinate with everyone who's died to find a unique HSN, so you go for the next best thing: generating a random one. Turns out, this is very applicable to distributed systems: a bank, for example, needs to decide the order in which transactions happen, ideally without coordinating with all bank computers, which can take a long time. This is the classic problem of consensus: now the question is, can having transactions randomly self-assigning an order reduce the coordination required, which probabilistically guaranteeing the same thing?

Computer Science

David

Earth's Health Gauges

Develop a set of metrics for understanding how Earth is doing with regards to environmental factors, human rights fulfillment, and other key wellness criteria.

Computer Science, Economics, Quantitative, Social Science

Thor

Secure Chat Application

For this project, you would create your own chat application, allowing users on different machines to communicate. You would also implement security measures, including authenticating users (via a username/password), and identifying/blocking suspicious messages.

Computer Science

Mary

Stress and Strain Sensor Design

Sensors that measure forces and change in dimensions are ubiquitous in our day-to-day life, from use in airplanes and cars to monitor the tires and wings to your phone which uses them to enable technologies like Touch ID. All of these complicated sensors, however, boil down to the same set of sensor design principles and physics. In this project, you will learn about these mechanisms and how sensors transform mechanical signals to electrical ones. The project will culminate in designing your own sensor to measure stress or strain and wiring it up to collect the data.

Engineering, Computer Science, Quantitative

Gokul

Summer side business

For the entrepreneurially-minded, looking for a side business - let's take your idea (or find an idea) and make sure you know how to obtain customers, keep track of financial records, and create a sustainable schedule.

Computer Science, Business

Melissa

Create animations for math or physics concepts

Physics seeks to model the rules by which the state of the universe evolves over time. We describe these dynamics with equations and can draw figures to illustrate concepts, but often times for things to really make sense we need an additional dimension for our visualization: time. In this project you would choose one or more concepts from physics you'd like to simulate, and you'd learn how to use a tool such as Mathematica or Blender to create an animation that visually explains these concepts in an intuitive manner.

Physics, Computer Science, AI/ML

Ben

Robots, Bubbles, and Efficient Markets

There's an old joke in economics that goes like this. A financial economist is walking with his student, and the student sees a $100 dollar bill on the ground. The student is excited, and goes to pick it up, but the professor stops him and says, "there couldn't be $100 on the ground. If there were, someone would have already picked it up!" The professor is expressing the "Efficient Markets Hypothesis", that claims all stock prices are correct, because if they weren't someone could buy and sell them to pick up $100. Of course, many economists don't believe this! There is a whole school called Behavioral Economics that studies how markets fail, why prices are wrong, and the human psychology that causes these inefficient markets to emerge. Typically, behavioral economists work with volunteers, who trade stocks or play games (not the fun kind). The economist try to create price bubbles or market frenzies, and show how irrational people are. But what about AIs? We could program AI to play in these game environments together, and see if the same bubbles and market frenzies occur. Do they eventually turn into the efficient professor after playing the game many times? Can they adapt when the rules of the game are changed? What can we learn about ourselves by studying how robots behave in similar situations?

Computer Science, Economics, Math, AI/ML, Finance

Jesse

Design of autonomous car using tiny machine learning

1. Beginner research paper. I have worked with students to pursue projects related to machine learning-based Internet of Things. The rapid advancement of technology has led to the emergence of autonomous systems capable of performing various tasks with minimal human intervention. One such area of development is autonomous cars, where tiny machine learning (TinyML) can play a significant role. TinyML involves deploying machine learning models on resource-constrained devices, enabling real-time data processing and decision-making at the edge. This research proposal aims to investigate and develop autonomous cars using TinyML, with a focus on enhancing the quality of auto-driving and support for individuals in various contexts. You will create prototype and publish a conference paper.

Computer Science, AI/ML

Thuan

Soft Robotic Grasping Design Review

Soft robotics has become a very active research area in the last 10 years, primarily because of it's ability to interact with delicate objects, such as humans, animals and soft materials that are otherwise difficult to manipulate with classical rigid robots. In this project, you will explore the world of soft robotic graspers, how they work, and the different design principles at play. This will involve a thorough exploration of recent literature, culminating on writing a paper focusing on a specific type of grasping and its pros and cons. If students wish to, they may also fabricate their own gripper of a chosen type with improved design features.

Engineering, Computer Science, Quantitative

Gokul

Plant Cyborgs: Using Robotics to Give Freedom to your Plants.

Have you ever felt sorry for your plant? Or didn't have enough time to take care of it? In this project we are going to create a robot body for your house plant (using Embedded Systems like Arduino and Raspberry Pi), so it can walk around and take care of itself. If you are looking for even more of a challenge, I imagine we can do this with a goldfish instead :)

Engineering, Computer Science, AI/ML

Willie

Houseplant Helper Robot

In this project, you will design an Arduino-based robot to help with the keeping of houseplants. By connecting different sensors to the Arduino, you can monitor plant conditions, such as soil moisture, sunlight, temperature, and more. After processing this data using the Arduino, plant conditions can be communicated via simple LED lights, LCD display, or even a webpage.

Arts, Engineering, Computer Science

Gillian

Stellar Spectrum Analyzer

Objective: The aim of this project is to create a simple tool using Python that can analyze the colors in the light emitted by stars to determine their temperature, composition, and potential life stage. Research & Data Collection: Start by collecting data on various stars. This can be done by using online databases such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). Look for star spectra or data related to the colors/wavelengths of light emitted by stars. Coding the Analyzer: Using Python, write a program that can: * Accept input data related to a star's spectrum. * Analyze the data to determine key characteristics, like dominant color/wavelength and estimated temperature. Visualization: Incorporate a plotting library like matplotlib in Python to visualize the star's spectrum, highlighting key areas or colors that indicate specific elements or temperature ranges. Interpretation & Conclusion: After analyzing a variety of stars, use the tool to: * Classify stars based on their temperature. * Make educated guesses about a star's life stage based on its temperature and composition (e.g., main sequence, red giant, white dwarf).

Physics, Computer Science, Math

Candice

Product Design Cycle

Design is often thought of as an ad-hoc process, but it requires proper implementation of several key steps such as understanding the specific need your design seeks to address and current shortcomings in the market, customer feedback, prototyping, testing, iterating, and delivering a final product. In this project, the student can implement the product design process on a project of their own choosing.

Physics, Engineering, Computer Science, Math

Fatak

What leads to antibiotic resistance in different types of bacterial infections?

Bacterial infections can be caused by various types of bacteria that have different characteristics. Based on the class the bacterium belongs to, different strategies may be used to treat the infection. However, for some types of infections, such as Tuberculosis and Strep, there are only a few remaining antibiotic medications that still work, in part due to the increase in resistance to existing antibiotics as the bacteria adapt. In this project, you will gather information on the various classes of bacteria, learn about the different strategies used to treat these different infections, and understand what leads to their antibiotic resistance. You will create a scientific research paper with a visual that combines your findings. You may also propose ideas for what could improve existing therapeutics or what kind of new strategies might work to treat infections instead.

Biotech, Biology, Engineering, Computer Science

Noam