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.
- AI/ML
- Animation
- Arts
- Biology
- Biotech
- Business
- Cancer
- Chemistry
- Cognitive
- Computer Science
- Creative Writing
- Dance
- Dentistry
- Economics
- Engineering
- Entomology
- Environmental Science
- Ethics
- Fashion
- Finance
- Game Design
- Healthcare
- History
- Illustration
- Languages
- Linguistics
- Literature
- Math
- Medicine
- Music
- Neuroscience
- Nutrition
- Organizational Leadership
- Philanthropy
- Philosophy
- Photography
- Physics
- Psychiatry
- Psychology
- Public Health
- Quantitative
- Social
- Social Science
- Sports Analytics
- Statistics
- Surgery
Detecting bots on Twitter
Now that computers are good enough to generate very convincing text completely on their own, people have become quite concerned about "fake news". In this project, we will investigate how easy it is to detect Tweets that have been written by computers in four steps: 1) Collect some data, some possibly labelled already as "fake". 2) Look at the statistical properties of "real" Tweets versus "fake" Tweets. 3) Write a computer program, for example a Naive Bayes classifier, for labelling new Tweets as "real" or "fake". 4) Evaluate how good the program is using a sensible metric.
Math, Linguistics, AI/ML
Arabian Nights
Students can choose from any of the “Arabian Nights” tales, and depending on language expertise, we will work through it reading in either English or Arabic (or a mix of the two). We will explore, analyze, and attempt to define some of the most common themes in the text: the power of storytelling, magic, adventure, fate, etc.
Literature, Languages, Creative Writing, Linguistics, Social Science
Explore slang trends in twitter corpora
Slang is rapidly changing, and may vary a lot depending on the age/gender/community of the speaker. The student will extract tweets from Twitter and explore trends in slang use over time. The student, through this project, can get an introduction into basic text analysis/processing techniques.
Computer Science, Languages, Linguistics
German Art Song (Lieder)--the Philosophy of Music and Poetry
I wrote my beloved dissertation on a form within the so-called German classical music tradition called "art songs" or "Lieder" (singular: "Lied"). A Lied is a poem set to music, usually by someone other than the poet. The poet may or may not have known the composer, or given their blessing to having it set to music--there was no copyright in those days, so the composer could use any text they wanted and do anything they pleased with it. My greatest fascination is with the meeting--or confrontation--of two separate artistic wills, and the magical transformation that happened when a composer like Franz Schubert or Robert Schumann set a poem to music. When it went well, the whole is more than the sum of its two parts. I'm hoping to turn this dissertation into a book and will need help with many parts of the process, including finding citations for quotes and sources that I already have, and also finding new material to enhance or deepen the argument. I might even need help getting permission from various places to use quotes, materials, or pictures (don't worry, I'd help you help me with technical stuff like that!). If you're interested in queer studies, there's also a connection (even if not a very obvious one) between that and my German art song project that I'd love help developing. Knowledge of German, or at least curiosity about it and a desire to learn, is helpful though not required--same goes for music.
Music, Philosophy, Linguistics
Creative Writing: Blending Genre, Exploring Form
In this project, we'll learn the rules of literary craft while finding innovative ways to break them. We can explore poetic forms like the sonnet, ghazal, or epic and how to remix them in your own artistic style. I can teach you tools from poetry and memoir to explore your lived experience in a lyric essay. This is not a project about fitting the bounds of tradition; it is about learning to create literature that is uniquely and authentically yours.
Creative Writing, Linguistics
Scientific Literature Review
Do you want to know what the scientific literature says about somethingyou are interested in? Let's review the scientific literature to support your project with a review of current research of a topic of your interest.
Neuroscience, Quantitative, Linguistics
Sociolinguistics: A Dialectic Investigation
Conduct a study in sociolinguistics—who speaks how and why? In this project, we will learn how to scientifically observe the speech patterns of those around us and uncover some possible social, political, and historical reasons why. No prerequisites in linguistics required—only an inquisitive mind and an eager ear!
Creative Writing, Linguistics
The Future of Social Media Platforms
Social media platforms have gained much popularity all over the world in the last two decades. This has shrunk the world in terms of knowledge sharing and communication. Social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook are considered the main sources of breaking news these days. They were thought of as empowering individuals to publish their ideas. This was thought of as the democratization of knowledge and the end of censorship on social and political ideas. Recently, social media platforms are accused of being the main source for spreading fake news, hate speech, bullying and even prompting racial intolerance. This research investigates current practices of social media platforms and seek to come up with recommendations for maintaining the democratization of knowledge without promoting fake news and racial intolerance.
Linguistics, AI/ML
The Tower of Babel: Languages of the World
We will explore the key topics in global linguistic diversity, enabling students to contextualize the language(s), region(s), or culture(s) in which they are interested. The student can pick one of the following themes to explore: a) the relationships between the world’s languages and language families; b) how languages vary in different social and cultural contexts; c) how the sounds and structures of the world’s languages may vary in general.
Literature, Languages, Creative Writing, Linguistics, Social Science
Research Proposal
Looking to get approval or even some funding towards a project you're passionate about? Together, we will work through the steps to developing a strong proposal, including researching existing literature, developing research questions or project goals, and devising a timeline and/or budget. We will also discuss persuasive writing strategies and adapting writing to institutional contexts.
Languages, Linguistics
Bringing Your Story to Life
Storytelling has been around for thousands of years. It's an essential part of being human. In this project, let's bring your story to life, whether it be through film, theatre, song, or any other concept that you have in mind.
Music, Linguistics, Cognitive
Robot Ed Sheeran: Making an AI Composer
Current state-of-the-art ML for music (see: OpenAI, Google Magenta) is bad at learning long-form structure. I believe this is because their approach of swallowing and vomiting MIDI files does not reflect the vast amount of prior information we have as humans: we have ears that pick up on the subtle ways that pitches interact, and we're hard-wired to understand linguistic structures. Let's build a better AI with these inductive biases and generate some funk!
Neuroscience, Math, Linguistics, AI/ML
How can we write rules for a language game?
We do so much with words. Consider, for instance, our practice of questioning and asserting. In raising questions, we determine what problems to resolve. In asserting propositions, we resolve questions by present things as being certain ways rather than others. Our practice of questioning and asserting can have profound effects on others. In skillfully questioning and asserting, we can achieve equitable agreements, well-coordinated actions, and insightful research. In abusively questioning and asserting, we reap such harms as silencing, unwarranted subordinating, gaslighting, and propogating misinformation. How should we scientifically explain our ways with words? Many linguists and philosophers explain them as being moves in a rule governed language game. Others reject language games as unhelpful metaphors. Together, we'll examine both sides to understand what we explain when writing the rules of a language game. Pre-requisites: None. All you need is a curiousity for how our words bear meanings and how we can use our words to effect substantive change. We will start by reading classical philosophical works in the philosophy of language, foundational texts in linguistics, and thoughtful reflections by public intellectuals and then engage with recent research as the project develops.
Linguistics, Cognitive
Role of Stigma in Health and Social Outcomes of Autistic Individuals
In this project, we will explore the role stigma may play in health and/or social outcomes of autistic individuals. Much work in autism focuses a lot on the perspectives of researchers and/or caregivers and not much on the lived experiences of autistic individuals (although this is starting to gradually increase). Given that many autistic individuals report poorer healthcare outcomes, this project is interested in exploring the role stigma might play. This project can focus on either autistic children, adults, or transition youth depending on your interests. We can work together to determine the method of this work (i.e. literature review, survey/questionnaire, documentary, etc) depending on your skillset and interests.
Social, Linguistics
(Intermediate/Advanced) Efficacy of math education methods in different countries
Basically every country agrees that math is an important topic to study in schools, but how to go about teaching math differs wildly between all of them. This project would study different math teaching methods throughout a number of countries along with a specified parameter (such as test results, future academic success, research success, etc) to measure the efficiency of each method and what results each method provides. This could culminate in a paper, a podcast or other creative project, or a presentation.
Music, Math, Linguistics
Critical Humanities Study of Your Choice
We can design and carry out together a project on anything in the humanities that interests you. Though I'm mainly a scholar of literature, philosophy, and music, we can work on anything in the humanities that interests you.
Music, Philosophy, Linguistics
Iconicity
A general feature of human languages is that the way words sound rarely has anything to do with what they mean. However, this is not always the case; for example, words beginning with "gl" often have similar meanings ("glimmer", "glisten", "gleam"). How often do these "form-meaning" mappings occur across languages, and why?
Linguistics, AI/ML
Criminal/Legal Case Study
Are you fascinated by crime? Pick a particular court case and dive into the evidence, trial transcripts, and case law. Or, pick a certain kind of crime and review the range of cases that fall under that verdict. You can share your findings in an investigative report or in a true crime podcast. You will gain experience reading legal texts, sorting through different kinds of information, checking the validity of sources, and learning about crime, law, and the justice system.
Languages, Linguistics, Cognitive
Politeness
Study how politeness, kindness and other behavioral phenomena are expressed differently across languages (e.g. English vs Mandarin Chinese), by using large-scale datasets.
Linguistics
Learn How to Do a Scientific Presentation
Being able to clearly communicate technical information, especially to non-experts (i.e. people in different fields), is one of the most important skills employers in academia and industry look for. Choose a topic within the fields of forensic science, linguistics, computer science, or cognitive science and get lost learning all about it. You will gain experience finding and reading scientific literature as well as comparing different research approaches. Not only will you deepen your knowledge in this area, but you will also learn how to effectively communicate this knowledge to others in a scientific presentation.
Languages, Linguistics, Cognitive