Houston 311 Quality Improvement: An Analysis of Citizen Satisfaction and Engagement
Team Members: Akin Bruce, Ben Herndon-Miller, Soo Bin Park, Ben Rieden, Emily Rychener
The goal of this project is to analyze 311 customer survey responses and gain insights into what drives positive and negative responses from the community. We use a combination of traditional statistical methods and machine-learning techniques to help the city of Houston optimize their operational models.
Sponsor / Mentors: Steven David (City of Houston), Dr. Meng Li (Rice)
Predicting Realized Variance in the S&P500
Team Members: Santiago Tellez, Oliver Jin, Jessica Yuan, Wei Wu, Ruimeng Xu
By using minute-level data of the S&P500 over a three and a half year time frame, we will predict the variance in the market to better price options.
Sponsors/Mentors: Dr. Andrew Wendorff (Belvedere Trading); Dr. Dan Kowal (Rice)
Primary Visual Tuning for Movements in Mice
Team Members: Kevin Li, Tengjiao Liu, Xincheng Tan, Yuchong Zhang, Yuyan Liu
Neuron Tuners team has been exploring how the movements of a mouse correlate with its brain activities in the visual area. We are interested in how much of the movement-related information is encoded in the primary visual cortex.
Sponsor / Mentors: Dr. Jacob Reimer (Baylor College of Medicine), Dr. Genevera Allen, Tianyi Yao, Andersen Chang (Rice)
Searching for Auditory Responses in the Visual Cortex
Team Members: Aziza Salako, Rui Qin, Sadie Richardson, Elliott Smith, Kenneth Li
As a Data Science Projects team, our overarching goal for the semester is to process the ambient noise recordings, detect acoustic features like mouse calls, human voices, and other noises, and identify neurons in the visual cortex that respond to these auditory cues.
Sponsor / Mentors: Dr. Jacob Reimer (Baylor College of Medicine), Dr. Genevera Allen (Rice)
Validation of Urban Parks in Houston as a Flood Mitigation Tool
Team Members: Adam Strathman and JeongSu Park
An interdisciplinary team of statisticians, civil engineers, and architects have been assigned the task of promoting and implementing urban parks as a way to mitigate the damages of future flood events. As data scientists, we will work with parcel-level appraisal data gathered by Harris County Appraisal District and a dataset of elevation certificates of residential parcels within Brays Bayou to map and quantify the benefits of urban parks based on their ability to reduce flood risk in and around the City of Houston.
Sponsor / Mentors: Dr. Reggie DesRoches and Dr. Antonia Sebastian (Rice), Dr. Katherine Ensor (Rice)
Genomic Basis of Alzheimer's Disease
Team Members: EunYeop Kim, Dessy Akinfenwa, Ami Sheth, Jason Yin and Miten Shah
The goal is to utilize a combination of unsupervised and supervised learning approaches to derive a set of mouse models on which experiments can be performed to find treatments for Alzheimer's Disease.
Sponsor / Mentors: Dr. Ying-Wooi Wan (Baylor College of Medicine), Dr. Genevera Allen (Rice)
Predicting Illegal Dumping in Houston Using 311 Service Helpline Requests
Team Members: Sarah Asson, David Brodkey, Richard He, Nick McMillan, Emma Min
Our team uses reports of illegal dumping collected via Houston's 311 Service Helpline platform to develop a model that can predict month-ahead spatial patterns of illegal dumping. We use these spatial predictions to identify hotspots of illegal dumping where we recommend the City of Houston place cameras to catch perpetrators of this crime.
Sponsor / Mentors: Steven David (City of Houston), Dr. Dan Kowal (Rice)