For the Final Project, it is up to you to decide what to do, consistent with the course goals.
Teams
You may work in a team of from 1 to 38 students, but we expect most teams to be 2-4 students. If you want to work alone, you will need to make a convincing case why you will get more from the project by working alone than by working with others.
The impressiveness of your project should scale with at least the square root of the number of class participants on your project team. If you want to form a team with more than four students, you will need to make a case that you have a project idea that benefits from such a large team, and a management plan for making a large team successful. There are no other constraints on the formation of your team, although we expect most teams will be a mix of CS and Economics majors.
Regardless of the size of your team, you should have a project plan that involves contributions from all team members. Everyone on the team should have a clear responsibility for parts of the project, and contribute substantially to the overall success of the project. Except in extraordinary circumstances, all team members will receive the same grade.
Topic
For your project topic, you can work on any topic you would like that is relevant to the course. This means it should involve aspects of both Economics and Computer Science, with broad definitions of what each discipline encompasses.
A project topic should satisfy at least three of these goals:
- fun (for you to do, and for others to see)
- relevant (to the class)
- technically interesting
- useful (at least to your team, but hopefully to many)
We will provide some ideas for potential projects to help you think of a project idea, but you should not feel constrained by these suggestions, and we hope many student teams will come up with creative ideas that are not based on our suggestions.
Deliverables
There are four deliverables for the Final Project, described next.
Project Proposal
Due Thursday, 11 April (8:59pm). Your project proposal should contain:
Title of your project: short description that clearly captures your project idea.
A short paragraph that describes the goal of your project.
A project jusfication that explains for at least three of the goals above (fun, relevant, technically interesting, useful) how your project satisfies them.
A project plan that explains the main tasks needed to successfully complete your project and what you will actually do.
Resources you have found or your plan for finding them. For most projects, this should include a list of papers relevant to your project. For many projects, it will also include datasets and code that you plan to use.
A list of your team members and their roles and responsibilities. If your team has more than two people, this should also explain how you plan to coordinate and manage your team.
You should submit your project proposal by sending a slack message to
a group that includes all of your team members and all of the course
staff: @Dave @Denis Nekipelov @Joe
Roessler @Jonas. You can submit the proposal as a
PDF file attachment to the message.
Project Team Meetings and Progress Reports
These will be scheduled individually, the week of April 15. All team members are expected to participate in the team meeting. At the team meeting, you will be expected to adress any questions that were raised about your proposal, and to explain what your team has done so far. This is also an opportunity to ask any questions you have and get advice from the course staff.
Project Presentations
In class, on Tuesday, 30 April (the last day of class), each team will have an opportunity to present your project. (Details will be announced later.)
Project Reports
Final project reports are due, Monday, 6 May (4:59pm). The format of the report will depend on your topic and how to best present it, but we hope many teams will end up with project reports that are interactive web sites (which could be built from Jupyter notebooks) and include open source code and data.