Project HW 1 (Due 1/24) -- 5 points
Download a data set and answer the following questions:

• a.) Where did you get your data?
• b.) Briefly describe your data
• c.) What format is your data in (eg excel, text, etc.)?
• d.) How many data points are in your data set?
• e.) Does your data live in a fixed dimension and if so, what is that dimension?

Project HW 2 (Due 1/26) -- 10 points
Draft of slides describing a clustering method.

Project HW 3 (Due 2/2) -- 10 points
Write a 2-5 page description of a clustering method (include R command(s)).

Project HW 4 (Due 2/7) -- 10 points
Slides describing a clustering method.

Project HW 4 (Due 2/7) -- 10 points
Slides describing TDA mapper.

Project HW (Due 2/17)
Intro draft including 2, 8, 10

Project HW (due 3/23) -- 30 points
2 well-written pages plus comments from the Writing Center

Project HW (due 4/4) -- 100 points
Draft of your project which should be at least 50% done.

Project due 4/25 (200 - 500 pts)

Draft of project slides due 4/30 (50 pts)

Project HW (due 5/5) Outside presentation (25 - 100 pts each for up to 300 pts total)
Researchers present their work at conferences. You should too. Find one that interests you and submit an abstract for either a talk or a poster. Travel funds may be available to cover your travel costs. You may present your work at a research conference, an undergraduate research conference, seminar, record a video podcast etc., either off-campus or on.

Some conference at (or related to) UI:

Iowa Informatics Showcase Symposium February 17

ICRU Undergraduate Research Conference, Sunday, February 26th, 2017 from 10:30AM - 3:30PM in 2520D UCC (Old Capitol Mall)

13th Annual SURF -- Wednesday, April 19th, 2017, 4:30-6:30PM on the second floor of the UCC.

Research in the Capitol, Tuesday, March 28, 2017, Des Moines, IA

Three Minute Research Story Competition

One can also give a seminar at UI or a public talk.

TBA

ICRU Student Travel Awards

The Dewey Stuit Fund for Undergraduate Research and The Maureen Medberry Snell CLAS Award

If you are collaborating with someone, you should decide as a group how the work will be divided and what you would like to accomplish. I will not require that you finish all (or even most parts), but your collaborators can. The following is one potential project outline, but you may follow any journal format you prefer. Note that while the ideal paper would include all of the following, even published papers do not include all of the following. You and your collaborators will need to decide what to include.

NOTE: Even published papers do not include all (or even most) of the following. You and your collaborators will need to decide what to include.

1. Abstract.
2. Introduction: Briefly introduce the problem, techniques, and outline the paper. Try to use as few technical terms as possible (or reference section where defined).
3. Background
• Problem description:
Fully describe the problem. Describe how the data is created, what is its format, what are issues that one should consider (for example are their different types of noise), etc. Please keep in mind that people from a variety of backgrounds may be interested in your article, so please help them understand your data. Deeper mathematics can be applied if more people have a better understanding of the problem.
• Mathematical background:
One can reference appropriate papers that describe the methods used in your paper or you can provide the background yourself. Including motivation specific to your problem would be particularly helpful.
4. Results
• Data analysis.
In either the results or discussion section, motivate your choice of software. Software often requires one to choose various values for different parameters. Motivate your parameter choices. Are these choices robust (for example, does one get similar results for different choices of parameter values).
5. Discussion
• What do your results mean?
This will depend on your application. For example, if you find a hole in your data, you might be able to determine exactly where that hole comes from as was done in Adam's and Carlsson's On the nonlinear statistics of range image patches.
• Compare your results to results using other types of data analysis tools.
• Validation:
Part of validation includes motivating and determining the robustness of the choices you made when analyzing the data and comparing your results to previously published results. But another part is to determine if the results give you useful information for your particular problem. For example, a cluster found in Topology based data analysis identifies a subgroup of breast cancers with a unique mutational profile and excellent survival by Nicolau, Levine, and Carlsson was validated by further examining the biological properties of this cluster. Of course, this requires laboratory experiments which your collaborators may or may not be able to perform.
6. Conclusion
7. Acknowledgement
You should acknowledge anyone who has provided significant feedback. If you publish the results of your project, please acknowledge this course. If I provide you with significant helpful feedback, you are also welcome to acknowledge me.
8. Author contribution
Summarize who contributed what to the paper (who designed, computed, analyzed, wrote, etc.).
9. Funding sources and conflicts of interest
10. References
This is a very important part of your paper. It lets the reader know where to find additional information. One is also required to reference other people's ideas, analysis, conclusions, figures, etc (even if modified, reworded, or redrawn). Using other people's work without acknowledgment constitutes plagerism. For figures, one may also need to obtain copyright permission if you submit your paper for publication, and redrawing a figure may be discouraged.

If you prefer to write software, there are many other types of potential projects.