/TrafficRC2020

Data Science Research Circle at Pomona College in Spring 2020 -- supervised by Jo Hardin & Ghassan Sarkis. Undergraduate researchers: Amber Lee (‘22), Arm Wonghirundacha (‘22), Emma Godfrey (‘21), Ethan Ong (‘21), Ivy Yuan (‘21), Oliver Chang (‘22), and Will Gray (‘22)

Final report at https://hardin47.github.io/TrafficRC2020/Report/

ResearchCircle2020

Hardin/Sarkis -- Spring 2020

Data Science Research Circle -- Math 119

Data Science Research Circle at Pomona College in Spring 2020

description

  • Goal. The research circle is a half-credit course whose main goal is to give you a taste of statistical research. This circle will consist of approximately two faculty members and five students. During the semester, you will grapple with data analysis with the help of the faculty members. In the process, you will learn some new data science, but more importantly, you will gain experience in understanding data on your own, by analyzing samples of data, by looking for patterns, and by possibly experiencing the joy of coming up with previously-unknown methods and conclusions.

  • Prerequisites. You are a second- or third-year math major at Pomona College. You have in your repertoire Linear Algebra and some combination of statistics and programming. You like thinking about math problems, and want to try your hand at research.

  • Class structure. The whole group---students and faculty---will meet once a week for two hours on Tuesdays 11am-1pm. Early in the semester, part of the meetings will be an exposition of relevant material by the faculty. However, more commonly, we will work on some aspect of the problem together. To facilitate discussion, homework tasks will be assigned every week and discussed during the meetings. As the semester progresses, more of the meetings will be devoted to discussing possible routes---suggested by the participants---to solving the open questions. For the most part, the faculty will not work on the open questions outside of these meetings, but during the meetings, everyone will participate fully.

Note that the time of the course runs through the lunch hour. Everyone is expected to attend for the entire two hour block. You are welcome to bring food with you, but you will not have time to leave the meeting to get food.

  • Student meetings. The students will meet twice a week outside of class. For the first meeting or the week, the students will convene within 24 hours or so after class to make sure that they are on the same page about what was discussed in class and about the homework tasks. If the material lends itself to a division of labor, then different students (or groups of students) will volunteer for parts that interest them. A second, longer student meeting will take place prior to the next class. During this working session, the students will cover as much ground as they can, and they will make sure that the homework tasks are completed satisfactorily.

  • Weekly homework tasks. Towards the beginning of the semester, the tasks will be similar to homework assignments in other math classes: they may consist of exploratory questions with known answers that are intended to assist in understanding the material or motivate the next steps. As the semester progresses, more of the tasks will be open-ended and with unknown answers. You are expected to work together on the tasks and you are encouraged to use other resources (e.g., books, papers, websites).

  • Collaboration. Collaborative research is at the heart of this class. Different students will have different styles and different strengths. With research, at some point, you will have to sit down with paper and pencil (or chalkboard and chalk, or laptop and fingers) and work in isolation and for yourself. However, much is to be gained by talking out your ideas and listening to approaches and ideas of others. You will therefore contribute your own ideas and explanations as well as make an effort to facilitate the work of the group.

  • Participation. You will fully participate in each class session and student meeting. Unlike a traditional class, there are no exams, and homework will not be collected. Instead, you will be ready to engage the material as we discuss it. This may be hard at the beginning, and different levels of participation may be more comfortable for different students. However, you are expected to be fully present and engaged.

  • Writing. There will be at least three types of writing for this class.

  1. You will record in a personal notebook everything you do for this class, including solutions to homework tasks, questions, examples, half-baked ideas, conjectures, proofs, and analyses. As we move from one idea/topic to another, it will be important to have recorded what you have done, since, often, old examples and ideas will end up being useful unexpectedly.

  2. There will be times when an aspect of the project needs to (or can) be written up. These could be details of analysis methods, well-communicated results, details of examples, or proofs. These should be done in LaTeX or R Markdown; and uploaded to GitHub.

  3. At every class session, we will have two scribes, who will be called Sam, and who will take notes. These notes should be cleaned up---possibly written up in LaTeX or R Markdown ---and loaded up to GitHub at least 3-4 days before the next session.

  • GitHub resources. We will have a class (private) GitHub repository. Every student will be a member, and you will all have your own folder. Additionally, there will be folders for write-ups of homework tasks, class notes as taken by Sam, and copies of relevant papers you came across will doing research. Every student should become fluent with working in GitHub.

  • Grading. Grades will be assigned according to the following general guideline:

    • A The student has come to all class and student meetings, participated fully, fulfilled their role as a scribe admirably, coded, and written up one or more items for the GitHub collection. In addition, the student has taken a leadership role in an aspect of the project, and contributed some significant idea, proof, or analysis.

    • A- The student has come to all class and student meetings, participated fully, fulfilled their role as a scribe admirably, and written up one or more items for the GitHub collection.

    • B+ The student has come to all class and student meetings, participated reasonably well, and fulfilled their role as a scribe appropriately.

    • Lower Grades. Unexcused absences or excessive tardiness for either class or student meetings, lack of participation or engagement, or an inadequate effort to be up to date with the material will generally bring down your grade.