Artificial Intelligence undergraduate project help on idea and its influence on a later on masters degree

Question

Hey guys,

I am a Computer Science student. I want to do an AI project for my 4th year with two other students. (It's a 5-year degree in my university so I can pursue the same project for two consecutive years if I want to). Our knowledge in AI is very basic at this moment since we'll be specializing in it these coming two years, so a very advanced idea will probably be hard to accomplish. We're not expected to research new untouched soils either, so the more resources the better.

I'm interested in ideas that can benefit people and not just applying algorithms and techniques. I want to do a masters after graduation, but I'm not sure in what field yet. I'd love to do a medical application or a project that of some use to the handicapped. Some projects that were already pursued at the university included a project to recognize breast cancer, and to teach sign language to the deaf.

I'm wondering:

1) what other ideas we can work on in those fields?

2) how much will my choice of graduation project affect my application for a masters degree?

3) Is a stocks price prediction expert system too advanced for us?

Thanks a lot.

Answer 1

1) what other ideas we can work on in those fields?

It's amazing to me how little imagination computer science students seem to have. Stackoverflow.com is rife with questions about first projects from beginners and students.

I think that using statistics and data in novel ways, like Peter Norvig's spell checker, would be most interesting and fruitful.

Dr. Peter Norvig is a well-known computer science professor and AI guru. He's the CTO of Google now. Perhaps you can mine a choice out of his writings.

2) how much will my choice of graduation project affect my application for a masters degree?

Depends on too many other factors that you don't mention, like your past record as a student, etc. Probably a minor factor, in my opinion. Nobody is admitted to a masters program on the basis of a graduation project. Neither your undergrad project nor a masters thesis is a doctoral dissertation. Don't get them confused.

3) Is a stocks price prediction expert system too advanced for us?

I think stock price prediction is too advanced for anybody. After years of applying Fourier analysis, statistical models, Monte Carlo simulations, etc. if it were possible to do it would have been done.

Answer 2

2) how much will my choice of graduation project affect my application for a masters degree?

If you are applying for a PhD, the faculty in the prospective department tend to favor students who are interested in the research they are doing, or who have demonstrated the ability to do their own research. For a Masters these are not much of an issue, but they can make a little difference.

3) Is a stocks price prediction expert system too advanced for us?

Well, if you did then you would start using it to make money, others would see what you are doing an imitate you so that pretty soon your arbitrage opportunity would be gone.

Still, these type of systems are often built by students in machine learning classes, mostly due to the fact that there is a lot of data freely available and well formatted data on stock prices, so its easy to get starting writing the program. It is a good way to get insight into machine learning algorithms.

Answer 3

1) what other ideas we can work on in those fields?

Dr. Russel Greiner has a nice list of possible student projects in machine learning, several of which are related to medicine.

2) how much will my choice of graduation project affect my application for a masters degree?

It probably won't matter very much. However, choosing a ridiculously easy project probably won't help. I'm sure that you'll be vetting whatever you choose with your prof, so don't worry about that so much. Find a topic you're passionate about first and foremost.

3) Is a stocks price prediction expert system too advanced for us?

Yes. Don't bother with that nonsense. The game of Go will be solved before anyone figures out the stock market.

Answer 4

1) what other ideas we can work on in those fields?

Are there any faculty members at your university that work in the field of bioinformatics? If so, talk to them and see if they give you a suitable project idea that gets you excited. If you decide to take this path, try to enroll in an Intro to Bioinformatics course as it will help you get familiar with the field and generally make things easier.

Answer 5

1) What other ideas we can work on in those fields?

Find some problem that you are passionate about, will learn something from by tackling it, and is within the scope of your time, effort, and ability. Projects like this are relevant not only for grad school but also when applying for entry-level jobs (even if a few years off still after doing a masters degree)l. It helps to pick something you can put on a resume that shows your level of accomplishment and ability to complete a task.

2) How much will my choice of graduation project affect my application for a masters degree?

The topic choice probably won't matter significantly except perhaps for top-tier programs or if you have notable weaknesses in other admissions criteria. If the latter is true, then a good project may help, but even the latter is uncertain. Masters program admissions I think is generally handled by administrative staff, so they are probably more interested in whether or not you did a project than what the topic is.

3) Is a stocks price prediction expert system too advanced for us?

Yes, a stock price prediction system is far too difficult if you want a system that actually can work reasonably well over anything other than a small training data set.

The market is neither a natural system, a machine, nor even a system of rational collective behavior. Its pricing mechanism is in general irrational: investors/traders may make transactions at prices that are reasonable for them relative to their own decision criteria, but the market as a whole is generally not rational. The market is more an aggregation of behavior rather than collective behavior.

The above alone would make for an intensively difficult problem to solve with AI methods, but beyond that there are issues of problem scale, the amount of training data which is needed, etc.

There are of course a large number of Wall Street trading firms using quantitative methods for high-frequency trading, etc. They are effective, however, because they are focused on narrow problems (price trends over the next few seconds-to-minutes in highly-liquid stocks, S&P index futures, etc.), they put a lot of work into their models and generally are constantly rebuilding the latter on a daily/weekly basis, and they understand the market's nature, i.e., it's largely irrational as a whole and is a competitive, shifting landscape of exploiting the pricing inefficiencies inherent to large money flows.

I would only recommend this problem domain if you have an intense personal interest in financial markets and have already spent a lot of time studying them, are prepared to fail, and are interested in learning a lot. Trying to work on this problem is certainly a good learning opportunity, but it will be hard to achieve any real success except for small problems unless you have many years to devote.