D2K Capstone Teams
Team Name: Audubon
Project Title: Development of Machine Learning Algorithms for Precision Waterbird Monitoring
Monitoring of colonial waterbirds is essential to inform conservation decisions and gauge the surrounding ecosystem health. We develop computer vision algorithms to automatically monitor and survey colonial waterbirds using unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) imagery.
Team Name: AVANCE
Project Title: AVANCE
We analyze survey results from participants in the AVANCE program before and after their participation in the PCEP to determine which measures have the largest impact on future success in the program, as well as discover which factors have the greatest impact on families dropping out of the program.
Team Name: BCM SIDS
Project Title: Variable Extraction for Sudden Infant Death Syndrome Experiments in Mouse Models
We develop methods to extract and identify important features for analysis of apnea-inducing trials in mouse pups. These trials are reduced to discrete features describing the breathing and heartbeat patterns of the mouse and the impact of features relative to mouse survival is analyzed.
Team Name: Belvedere
Project Title: You Belong With Me: Bettering Hedging Through Clustering and Stock Selection.
By clustering representative stocks and selecting representative stocks for each cluster, we can substantially reduce the number of stocks required to mirror the movement of given market sectors, making hedging more efficient. Our project tackles clustering methods, cluster count estimation, and similarity measurement, among other factors, to build a time series clustering and selection technique well suited to the peculiarities of stock-market data.
Team Name: Base R Baddies
Project Title: Modeling Inequity in Harris County
Inequity is present throughout Harris County, as evidenced by the lasting presence of the “Houston Arrow”, a region of relative extreme affluence due to historical circumstances, across maps. Presenting our results in an interactive visualization dashboard, we use causal inference and structural equation models to identify important socioeconomic factors determining equity and their relationships, creating regression models to pinpoint and predict regions of inequity in Harris County so that communities experiencing barriers in achieving equity can be targeted and elevated.
Team Name: Customer Support Chatbot
Project Title: “Hello, My Name is IVA”: Bringing Bill.com’s Intelligent Virtual Assistant to Life as an AI Chatbot
To provide a more efficient online customer service experience, we built an AI-based text chatbot to interact with Bill.com users. Our chatbot can respond to customers’ questions to the best of its ability and route the conversation to a human agent when it can’t proceed.
Team Name: HFD – Houston Fire Department
Project Title: Analyzing Houston Fire Inspections
The purpose of this project is to build a model that can explore and predict any association between fire inspection data and fire-related incidents as well as community and property data.
Team Name: Pathfinders
Project Title: Translational Humanities for Public Health: Investigating Trends with NLP
Rice's Translational Humanities for Public Health project is collecting current pandemic-focused translational humanities research to create a resource for scholars across the globe. Our team has implemented natural language processing models that analyze the content of this research and produce insight into the themes and connections between different research projects.
Team Name: Stroke Risk
Project Title: UTHealth Stroke Prediction
Our project aims to implement a deep learning model to forecast the likelihood of recurrent stroke incidence. We leverage several modalities of medical data and graph machine learning to help our sponsors at UTHealth better allocate care to stroke patients.
Introductory Data Science Teams
Team Name: AirbnBros
Project Title: Airbnb Analytics: The Relationship between Price, Reviews, and Host Status
Analyzing Airbnb data from all of Austin's current listings, we looked at price, superhost status, and reviews to find existing correlations or relationships. By searching for a significant difference, mapping out bar graphs, or applying dimension-reducing analysis, we hoped to find a relationship that could help Airbnb hosts and clients make the best financial decisions in the future.
Team Name: Austin’s Animal Rescuers
Project Title: Austin Animal Shelter: An In-Depth Look
We analyzed information supplied from the Austin Animal Shelter in order to better understand an animal’s chance of getting adopted.
Team Name: College Covid
Project Title: Covid & Colleges
Our project uses covid data from colleges across the US and searches for a connection between covid case rates and other aspects of college.
Team Name: Covid by County
Project Title: Covid Cases in the United States
As part of the global response to the ongoing Coronavirus Pandemic, we have assessed the primary factors that highly impact the Covid infection rate. To explore, we used other demographic information, including population density, elderly population, unemployment rate, poverty rate, etc.
Team Name: Ka-Ching
Project Title: Who is Defaulting on Credit Card Payments?
We look at age, gender, education, and marital status in addition to financial information such as bill payments and bill amounts to find out what kind of person is likely to default on their credit card payment.
Team Name: NBA Youngboys
Project Title: Advanced Statistics and Their Correlation to Wins in the NBA.
Our project takes a look into why NBA teams win, specifically what advanced statistics correlate the most with wins. To do this, we combined NBA datasets from 1976, which was the year of the NBA-ABA merger, to present day.
Team Name: NFL Data Crunchers
Project Title: Running vs. Passing in the NFL
Our project analyzes and compares the effectiveness of running and passing in the NFL based on data from the 2020 season.
Team Name: NHANES Data Analysis
Project Title: Analyzing NHANES Health Survey Data
We are analyzing NHANES health and lifestyle survey data to see what variables are most likely to be predictors of specific health indicators, such as blood pressure and BMI.
Team Name: Student Performance
Project Title: What Factors Influence Student Performance?
Our project examines the relationship between various attributes of students to determine if any have a correlation with each other and/or student performance. Our dataset specifically deals with students in secondary education in two Portuguese schools.
Team Name: Study Room 464
Project Title: Education and Political Affiliation in the 2016 Election
This project aims to elucidate the patterns of voting and identification among members of different education groups in the 2016 registered voter pool. In our lab notebook, we explore possible correlations between education level, political affiliation, demographics, and voting patterns in the 2016 presidential election.