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University Problem

• Link-> world-university-rankings
• Assignment-> Your company serves parents of prospective college students. Those parents want to know what is the best university for their child, who will be applying to colleges in a few months. They want their child only to apply to five schools. Of these, one should be the most prestigious school into which the student is likely to be admitted, and one should be the best "safety school."

You must design a questionnaire for the parents. With the data from that questionnaire your company uses the Kaggle dataset "World University Rankings " to give your clients the optimum list of 5 schools.

• Alfa-> Speaking about world or US university rankings. For example, it will be interesting to investigate a metric called administrators-faculty ratio

or administrator-student ratio in addition to faculty-student ratio. You know that these days, universities are spending a lot of money that is not related to improving education. How will the rankings go if we add that kind of parameter ? We can still use rudimentary statistics. I am not sure about whether we have the data about the number of administrators for every university.

Olympic swimmer problem

• Link: olympic-swimmers-may-have-gotten-an-unfair-advantage?
• Richard -> The Olympic swimmer problem sounds interesting, but probably requires too much fluid mechanics,

and fluid mechanics is harder than general relativity. (That's the claim of applied mathematicians who work in fluid mechanics.) But if Donghui and/or Sigal is willing to mentor the problem, it will be fine.

Misc, need orgnization

In addition to problems from websites such as Kaggle and Mathematical Problems in Industries, there are several papers related to problems in industry or government problems that I compiled for my past mathematical modeling course.

http://www.math.umassd.edu/~aheryudono/mth463s2012/case.html

Some of those papers are suitable for undergraduate students. Few examples are :

1. Designing a 401(k): A Case Study. P.J. Laumakis. SIAM REVIEW. Vol.45, No.4. 2003

2. Mathematical Models and the Design of Public Health Policy. S. Gupta, R.M. Anderson, R.M. May. SIAM REVIEW. Vol 35, No. 1. 1993

3. Calculus and Probability Determine the Performance of a Disk Drive. L.E. Moser. SIAM REVIEW. Vol 34, No. 4. 1992

4. The Global Positioning System and The Implicit Function Theorem. G. Nord, D. Jabon, J. Nord. SIAM REVIEW. Vol. 40, No.3. 1998

Best, Alfa

Possible Projects

Link	Brief Description	comment
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world-university-rankings
	Speaking about world or US university rankings. For example, it will be interesting to investigate a metric called administrators-faculty ratio or administrator-student ratio in addition to faculty-student ratio. You know that these days, universities are spending a lot of money that is not related to improving education. How will the rankings go if we add that kind of parameter ? We can still use rudimentary statistics. I am not sure about whether we have the data about the number of administrators for every university. Alfa
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lending-club-loan-data
[Digital HalfTone]	IBM problem of digital half-toning
[missing missing]	"Housing Prices: Advanced Regression Techniques" might fill the bill, but one of you would have to look a bit more deeply into it to see whether "advanced regression .." implies more sophistication than we should expect from our undergrads. Note that this competition started recently and doesn't end until March 1, 2017.