CMSE 495

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Michigan State University Data Science Capstone.

View the Project on GitHub msu-cmse-courses/cmse495-SS25

Seeking Data Science Capstone Community Partners

Department of Computational Mathematics, Science, and Engineering
Michigan State University
http://cmse.msu.edu/cmse495

The Department of Computational Mathematics, Science, and Engineering (CMSE) at Michigan State University (MSU) is seeking community partners1 to support projects in the Data Science Capstone Course. The broad goals of this capstone course are: (1) to provide practical, team-based, project development experiences to MSU’s senior undergraduate data science students, and (2) to help our partners make connections with data science students that may support the community partner’s technical and/or recruiting needs.

If you are interested please considering filling out the MSU Data Science Community Partner Connection Form and we will get back to you!

Who can be a community partner?

Typically our partners come from Industry, Governmental Agencies and Non-profit institutions. Our partners have ideas/problems and are looking for student teams to help solve their data science projects. We are seeking a variety of projects ideas and generally prefer ones that have one or more of the following properties:

Overview of Projects and Expectations

Community partners will have the opportunity to work with the course instructor to develop a data science project appropriate for a team of 4-5 seniors who have completed most of their Data Science degree at MSU. These students are familiar with multiple programming languages (e.g., Python, R, MATLAB, Bash, C++) and have experience in a range of data science skills and topics, including; databases, data manipulation, statistical analysis, optimization methods, computational modeling, large scale computing, scientific visualization, and machine learning. Each member of the team will work approximately 10-15 hours a week during the 10-12 week project period (totaling 400-900 person-hours per project). Unless the community partner makes other arrangements in advance, students will use university computational resources to complete the project, and results will be shared publicly (final reports, presentations, etc.).

Capstone project data pipeline. 1. Collection/Generation 2. Cleaning/Munging 3. Model Building / Analysis 4. Visualization/Storytelling

Ideal projects include each element of the data science pipeline, from data collection to presentation, as outlined above. However, projects may focus more heavily in some areas than others, depending on the community partner’s goals. Examples of the types of projects that may be appropriate include:

In an effort to build relationships and try to obtain the best project outcomes, community partners are encouraged to engage with students and instructors regularly. At a minimum, community partners are asked to meet monthly with student teams and provide weekly feedback by email. Additional informational, networking, and/or project-related activities will be available on a weekly basis for community partners interested in more engagement. For highly engaged community partners, the time commitment is expected to average 1.5 hours a week (~20 hours total).

Overview of Timeline and Next Steps

Interested community partners are encouraged to contact Dr. Dirk Colbry (colbrydi@msu.edu) as far in advance as possible. An initial meeting will be scheduled to share more information and determine whether this opportunity is a good fit for the community partner’s interests and needs.

In general, community partners who choose to move forward would work with the instructor to complete the following tasks during Fall 2024:

Key tasks during Spring 2025 include:

The tentative project timeline for Spring 2025 is outlined below:

Week Description
July 1 - November 15 Seek out potential community partners
July 1 - November 15 Meet with commmunity partners to develop project plan and work on agreements
December 1 Finish agreements between MSU and community partners
January 1-15 Finalize and upload projects descriptions to website
January 16-20 Teams assigned to each project
January 23-27 First Community Partner/Student/Faculty networking event
February 6-10 Project proposal presentations
March 20-24 Mid-Semester Progress Report and Presentation
April 24-28 Final presentations

Potential community partners should fill out the MSU Data Science Community Partner Connection Form. If you would like you can also reach out to Dr. Dirk Colbry (colbrydi@msu.edu) directly.

1Note: In addition to project descriptions, project partnership typically includes a $5,000 donation to the CMSE department; this donation may be waived for projects partnered by units at MSU, non-profits or in the state government

Written by Dr. Dirk Colbry, Michigan State University Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.