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

From iPhone to IMAX -- A review of contemporary cameras and their limits

Apple ad campaigns proudly show off pictures "Shot on iPhone" in subway stations throughout the world, and directors are quick to comment on the amount of technological progress that has occurred since their own childhoods by claiming we all had movie cameras in our pockets nowadays. Yet, major movies are exclusively shot on incredibly expensive equipment and one of the first things any creator will do when trying to build their business is to invest in a fancy camera. Why is that? What limits the image quality of smartphone cameras, and what exactly is won by moving to more expensive ones? In this project, the student will have to engage in extensive "reading" covering an eclectic mix of sources including textbooks, patents, manuals, YouTube videos, Wikipedia articles and research papers to understand both the basic physics of optical imaging and the design of modern-day cameras in order to answer these questions. The ultimate deliverable for this project could take many different forms, including a literature review, an oral presentation, or an explanatory YouTube video showcasing footage shot with different cameras while explaining the underlying science.

Physics, Sports Analytics, Math

Robert

Has Economic Inequality Transformed Innovation?

Historically, innovation in the consumer goods space has led to two beneficial outcomes for consumers: (1) an improvement in product features and (2) a reduction in product prices. In this paper, we argue that the increased concentration of wealth over the last 50 years in the US has shifted the benefits of innovation away from (2) by disincentivizing firms from focusing on price reductions as a means to achieve growth. To support this argument, we use the profit pool model and analyze the available profit pool by price point for a selection of consumer goods and electronics.

History, Languages, Sports Analytics, Economics, Business

Joseph

Brain-Computer Interfaces: Where are they now, where could they go?

Brain-Computer Interfaces are a hot-button topic within the Biomedical Engineering community right now. Scientists have been using them in a variety of applications stemming from prosthetics to data collection to use for machine learning. In this project, we dive deep into the use of brain-computer interfaces for disease detection and diagnosis to uncover the current progress being made in this field and its current trajectory.

Biotech, Engineering, Sports Analytics, Statistics

Anish

Player Projection Model

538's RAPTOR and basketball index's PIPM are just two examples of predictive models that take in a players past and current performance to predict out how they will be in the coming years. Similar to the draft model, understanding which player's are on the verge of improving and which have the potential to decline is important for NBA front offices. This project will include data gathering and cleaning, predictive modeling with the potential to create an app based visualization to show results.

Sports Analytics, Statistics

Taylor

Question and Answering System for school

Have you joined a new school? Or remember starting a new school year? Let's say you need to check some basic questions about school procedures. You could design a question and answer based chatbot for your school's website. This will involve developing a machine learning model that can understand and answer questions based upon all text sections included in your school website. Furthermore, there will be tasks involving data collection and preparation, some basic web development, model evaluation, deployment and monitoring. It can be a very practical project that can benefit the school community by providing quick and accurate answers to common queries, thereby helping the parents, staff and students.

Engineering, Computer Science, Sports Analytics, Math, Statistics

Divya

Chicago Food Health Inspection

For all the foodies out there, this is a great dataset to learn more about local and chain restaurants in Chicago. You can stratify the dataset and review inspection infractions based on your interests (like fast food chains). We can even feature engineer additional predictors to help predict whether or not a restaurant will have a violation. If you're not up for model building, we could even create an interactive dashboard solution to help visualize and better understand groups and patterns in the data. It really is all up to you! Dataset: https://data.cityofchicago.org/Health-Human-Services/Food-Inspections/4ijn-s7e5

Computer Science, Sports Analytics, Quantitative, Statistics

Atharv

Marketing to Free Agents

One project idea that I have had since writing my senior thesis involves combining the business and performance side of sports. When a player hits free agency in any sport, teams and General Managers across the league throw money at the player in hopes that he or she will sign with their team. However, choosing a new team is a life-altering decision that incorporates more than just salary as we have seen all too often. The goal of this research would be to derive a sales and marketing strategy with which General Managers can approach free agents. Through determining which factors - including salary, city quality, cost of living, team quality, etc. - move the needle most for players, this strategy could effectively help teams market themselves to free agents and increase the likelihood of not only signing their desired players, but potentially signing them for a discounted price.

Sports Analytics, Economics, Business

Molly

Whitespaces in Social Media

The world has come to love social media and all of its wonder. Today social media is still being understood at the most basic levels because it has only been around for a short amount of time. How do we use data to find whitespaces in the social media landscape to help grow a business. What strategies can be implemented and or tools used to increase engagement and hopefully profits.

Sports Analytics

cameron

Player Projection Model

Sports Analytics, Statistics

Taylor

The Impact of a Basketball Player's Angle Towards the Basket on Shooting Percentage

This project involves analyzing the effect that the angle between which a basketball player receives a pass from a teammate and the basket has on their chance of making a shot. I hypothesize that as the angle decreases, the chance of making the shot increases. This project could help basketball teams strategize their offensive schemes to increase their shooting efficiency.

Sports Analytics

Nick

Why ___ will be the next successful sports city.

*Note this is a very complex project* After the run of dominance of Boston in the first 20 years of the 2000's winning 12 combined championships among the four teams, which city is next primed to be a powerhouse for the next 20 years? Things to take a look at might include young talent on teams, new hires in front offices, economic development in cities, or maybe something else.

Sports Analytics

Joseph

Do the NFL combine drills predict a college athlete's future success in the NFL?

There's a lot of open-access data on NFL (and more) athletes' prior performance in college and their NFL combine drill performance. We could gather this data on players and see whether and to what extent NFL combine drill performance or past college performance (i.e. yards received, etc) predict the NFL performance (or Fantasy points) of a player in their first year in the NFL.

Social, Sports Analytics

Drew

Machine Learning in Sports

First gain an understanding of how machine learning is used in sports and sport science today before attempting to implement new architectures and methods on available youtube data. Baseball has a fantastic array of data that can easily be used for projects and can teach web scraping skills as well as machine learning techniques.

Engineering, Computer Science, Sports Analytics, AI/ML

Derek

Evaluating the Fairness of Large Language Models

This project could go in a wide variety of directions. However, the central concept here is to define certain language traits (eg: using "soda" vs using "pop") that are correlated with certain demographics. Then, we have the opportunity to analyze how good the responses from a large language model (eg: ChatGPT) are based on different language traits. Ultimately, we want to know if ChatGPT is biased towards certain traits.

Computer Science, Sports Analytics, Quantitative, AI/ML

Adi

Stadium and Attendance Project

I have data on stadium capacities and season attendance numbers from all of the Big 4 leagues (MLB, NFL, NBA, NHL) going back 20+ years (up to 2021). Maybe some interesting insights can be found from that? It would be up to the students to come up with where to go on this project!

Sports Analytics

Joseph

The A is for Analytics -- An examination of the statistical metrics commonly used in the NBA

While the impact that the "analytics revolution" has had on the NBA over the last two decades is undeniable, the value of individual statistical metrics is not. In fact, the continued onslaught of new "advanced stats" has many fans questioning the value of such statistics altogether. After all, if I can argue any player's case by cherry-picking the right advanced stat, what good are such metrics in the first place? In this project, the student will read up on each and every metric commonly encountered in basketball discussions and GOAT debates, from the traditional box-score numbers to modern inventions such as Adjusted Plus-Minus. The goal of the project is for the student to understand all of those metrics and to critically examine their origins, gaining meaningful knowledge about both basketball and statistics while furthering their critical-thinking skills in the process. Depending on student preference, the project could result in a literature review, presentation or YouTube explainer video, among other things.

Physics, Sports Analytics, Math

Robert

How Does the Absence of Fans Effect Performance?

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused sporting events to continue with little to no spectators in the crowd. I would like to investigate whether this impacts teams and players positively or negatively. This project would involve comparing team and player performance before and during the pandemic.

Sports Analytics

Nick

Basketball Statistics Reporting Website.

Not interested in predictive modeling? cleaningtheglass.com is a great example of the the usefulness of a clean and important reporting tool. This project will be more heavily focused on the data engineering and gathering and front end visualization.

Sports Analytics, Statistics

Taylor

Player Projection Model

Sports Analytics, Statistics

Taylor

Fan Cost Index & Attendance

As COVID comes to an end, a major concern of all major professional sports league (NBA, MLB, NFL & NHL) is the return of max attendance throughout their stadiums and venues. Yet this recovery has not come as quickly as some may have hoped and that can be due to a multitude of reasons. One major variable that would be interesting to look into is the cost of attending these events as it seems these events never go down in price. Cost of attendance could be a major deterrent for fans as they need to decide where discretionary money is spent. Analyzing the cost of attending sporting events by league, team, and region could be a major insight into why attendance may be stagnant.

History, Sports Analytics, Business, Finance

Gregory