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DS: 401 Capstone Projects

Selected projects from 2022:

P1: Public Health - Overdose Data Dashboard 

P2: USDA Commodity Dashboard(s)

P3: Classification and Analysis Pipeline of Political Video Advertisements - Dashboard with Google Cloud

P4: CSAFE Assessing and modeling quality of 3d topographic scans of fired bullets

P5: Department of Residence - The Impact of Living on Campus on Student Success


P1: Public Health - Overdose Data Dashboard 

The Public Science Collaborative at ISU is looking for advanced data science students to join a research project focusing on the engineering and visualization of public health data. The key task for the spring semester will be to build an opioid overdose data dashboard similar to this one in California. DS 401 interns will work in a supervised, collaborative team science environment to clean, analyze, and visualize data from four data sets, including a) vital statistics mortality data, b) emergency department overdose data, c) substance abuse treatment episodes data, and d) the Iowa Youth Survey dataset. We are a pluralistic coding environment and welcome students using Python, R, Stata, SAS, and other data management and analytic platforms.

Because this project is funded by an Overdose Data to Action. a grant from the Centers for Disease Control, students who are accepted to the project will have the opportunity to pair a funded research assistantship with their DS 401 internship. This opportunity would be an especially good fit for students who are interested in data visualization and data science communication.

Project advisors: Shawn F. Dorius - Associate Professor of Sociology

DS401-S22-P1-Poster_PublicHealth.pdf


P2: USDA Commodity Dashboard(s)

Students selecting this project will develop a series of dashboards using Tableau. These dashboards will utilize data from the USDA Agricultural Census to show trends in production for selected commodities (such as apples, cheese, grapes, dairy, pork, lettuce, tomatoes, potatoes, strawberries, bees, and honey or wine). Trends may also include the monthly or annual quantity, the number of producers, acres in production, total sales, and other metrics at multiple geographies (county, state nation). Students will also incorporate demographic data for selected areas of interest that highlights the potential regional market and the market and consumption profile (food expenditures, farmers' marker density, schools with farms-to-school programs, etc). Students will be provided with access to Tableau and Tableau Server and will utilize R’s TidyCensus package to acquire data from the American Community Survey (ACS).

Project advisors:

Christopher J. Seeger, PLA, GISP - Professor, GIS Specialist and Director of Extension Indicators Program and 2022 DSPG Chair

Bailey Hanson, GISP - GIS Specialist; Leads GIS program and Data for Decision Maker program. Note her background includes a Master in Human-Computer Interaction.

DS401-S22-P2-Poster_USDA.pdf


P3: Classification and Analysis Pipeline of Political Video Advertisements - Dashboard with Google Cloud

Using the public data from the Google Transparency Report, this project will create a pipeline of extracting, processing, classifying, and visualizing the Political Ads data using a Google Cloud computing platform.

Campaign advertising through social media platforms has been growing at a high rate, which creates a large volume of content on the Internet. To increase transparency in federal campaign advertising, Google Inc. created Google Transparency Report (GTR). GTR provides websites and searchable databases about federal election campaign ads aired on Google and partners’ platforms. According to GTR, political advertisers have spent around $800M on election campaigns since May 2018.

This project made a platform for a collection of video ads aired on YouTube and for automated content analysis. It's able to 1) automatically classify a video ad into either a political category or a non-political one, (2) analyze predicted political ads into one of these types of interest to political science scholars: promote, attack, or contrast, 3) extract issues of interest for political science research, and 4) determine the polarity and subjectivity of a given ad. 5) Create various visualization charts from the previous analysis. 

Project advisors:

Adisak Sukul - Associate Teaching Professor, Computer Science. Instructors for Data Science courses. Google Cloud Faculty Expert

DS401-S22-P3-Poster_GoogleTransparencyReport.pdf

 


P4: CSAFE Assessing and modeling quality of 3d topographic scans of fired bullets

A large part of a forensic examiner’s job is to visually compare evidence to decide whether two pieces of evidence come from the same source (e.g. bullets fired from the same barrel, prints from the same shoe, the same finger).

3d digital microscopy provides a basis to bring in algorithms in an attempt to make comparisons of evidence objective and quantify similarities (or dissimilarities). The high-resolution microscopy lab at Iowa State has acquired scans of bullet lands. 

Good-quality scans are essential for assessing the similarity of the striations (the marks engraved on the bullet as it passes through the barrel). 

In this project, the goal is to derive features capturing (aspects of) the quality of scans and build a model to predict a quality indicator. Ideally, this feedback will be given at the time of scanning, such that a lack of quality can be addressed immediately.

Students will work under the guidance of Dr. Heike Hofmann to derive features capturing scan quality, work on a model incorporating these scan analytics, and depending on time, design an app for giving feedback to scanning personnel.

Preferred skills: proficiency in R, and knowledge of HTML/javascript would be a plus.

Project advisors:

Heike Hofmann, Professor, and Professor in Charge of the Data Science Program - Department of Statistics

Final R Package: https://github.com/heike/DS401

DS401-S22-P4-Poster_CSAFE.pdf


P5: Department of Residence - The Impact of Living on Campus on Student Success

Project Description: The Department of Residence is interested in understanding how living on campus, both your first year and subsequent years after, impacts student success measures such as graduation and retention.  We’re also looking to understand whether those impacts are the same or different for different sub-groups of students (such as students of color, first-generation students, etc.).  The audience for this data would be considered a non-technical audience, with a limited background in understanding and analyzing data.  The data file is already compiled and will be provided to this team.  No preference for analysis software. 

This project contains sensitive and private information. All of the findings from this project will remain private.

Project advisors:

Dr. Elizabeth Housholder, serves as the Senior Research Analyst for the Department of Residence.

DS401-S22-P5-Poster_Residence.pdf