Course final projects

The course is now concluded, the grades are entered. The final activity of the semester was the final project presentations day, when 16 student teams presented the results of the 10-week class final project. The breadth of topics for the final projects was impressive and was made possible in part by over 15 class partners and collaborators who contributed and supported data-driven challenges for the students.

Each final project was unique. Driven by the importance of the applied context, the teams worked hard to make their project stand out. In the end, the final project presentations showcased great valuable work.

For example, the Deloitte team made a tablet app allowing to interactively display and explore high-accident road segments in the US. The Harvard-MIT team created a great studio-quality interactive visualization exploring factors contributing to purchases of carbon offsets for an Australian airline. The Diffeo team beat the last year’s winners of the DARPA challenge to algorithmically score relevancy of 9 TB of text documents. The Starbucks team came up with new models beating the standard operations research methods in terms of predictive accuracy when forecasting shipment occurrence and timing. The Harvard Stats team discovered that homophily plays a key role in the formation of the international financial network, which might have international policy implications. And these are just some of the projects.

I am excited for the students in the class who will go on to do great data-driven work ‥ they are surely well-equipped for it.