Past Poster Session!
We are going to end the class by having poster presentations. We are doing this to prepare you for scientific conferences and your senior thesis. It is really fun and inspiring to talk to your colleagues about their research. This will take place on the 4th floor of Altschul Hall during the last class (Photo above from a few years ago).
- You are going to create a poster using a data set and the poster will describe the data set and your analyses. I will be posting Datasets on this page that can be analyzed. But if there is an interesting dataset from your work/thesis/life you would like to analyze you can use it. Just make sure we talk before you begin to make sure it is appropriate. re-analyzing a lab report or data you have already analyzed is not appropriate.
- Each Person needs to make their own poster. Multiple people can work on the same data set and talk about the analysis as they do it in Python. But each person needs to create an individual Poster with their own hypothesis and thought process.
- We will do the poster session on the final class day during class time. Deadlines will be strictly enforced for the Poster session!
- We will set aside class time to work on the posters.
Due Dates
- Topic Due – April 3
- This will be one sentence on courseworks describing what you hope to study and where you think you can find the data.
- April 10 – Hypothesis and dataset due
- What is your initial hypothesis/question? Do you have access to the data? What is your first step?.
- Sunday April, 28 12:00pm (noon) Posters Due. Hard deadline. Each hour late counts as one late pass day.
- You will post a powerpoint and pdf of your poster on courseworks.
- Monday April 29, 10:10 – 4th floor Altschul. Poster presentations. Please come for ten minutes early so we can start on time. Bagels will be served.
Overall Goals and Details
Making a poster from real data is really hard. You are going to hit roadblocks you cannot imagine. Your goal is to ask a question and develop a hypothesis to test using data. I do not know how far you can take this. Some datasets are so messy getting them read in is a triumph. Sometimes you need to merge two datasets. Other times you need to really delve into the data to even understand what questions are feasible. It is going to be an amazing journey. Each time you learn something about your data it should open 100 more doors!
Data Sets
- Your can use your senior Thesis data or data from a summer internship. But you need to do a new analysis and can’t repeat something you have already done.
- Covid and College student well being. I have a dataset.
- Something that interests you.
- Tree Growth Around the Barnard Campus
- Bird Diversity at Black Rock Forest
- Brooklyn Lead dataset
- we have a dataset of ~800 deep wells from Bangladesh.
- Brian’s Time Series Data From Bangladesh. We have two questions we want to answer. First if arsenic is changing over time. For this we can just focus on the B wells for now. The second is Chloride to Bromide ratios. This are indicators of fecal contamination and we want to know how they vary with depth, location, and time. The data is on courseworks along with the well information
- New York City Tree Census
- CitiBike (This is hard because the datasets get too large)
- More ideas to come.
Elements of a Poster
- We will do a modified version of what is posted on the Senior Seminar Website. Here is my example poster. LastnameF_poster-21. Your Poster MUST BE THIS SIZE! YOU MUST USE THIS TEMPLATE!
- You will have a
- Title
- Abstract
- Introduction
- Goals or hypotheses (maybe)
- Methods
- Results
- Discussion
- Conclusion
- References
- Abstract-This is a brief overview. Since we are on small paper we will keep it to less than 100 words
- Introduction-Give a brief background of you problem and the issues. This can be bullets or a paragraph.
- Goals or hypotheses -I like one to three bullet points that succinctly say what you are trying to accomplish. This can then be tied to the conclusions.
- Methods-You should describe what you did.
- Results-We want some awesome graphs!!!!!!
- Discussion-What do the results mean? Why are they important? What is the bigger context?
- Conclusions-What are the main take home points? You can always tie back to your Goals and hypotheses.
- References-if you used any include them.
- The best way to learn about what should go into each section is examples. I will put up some posters around the classroom.
- TALKING ABOUT YOUR POSTER-One of the most important parts of a poster is talking about it to your audience. Can you explain it in 1-3 minutes and then answer questions. Basically can you explain your work and sell it?
Poster Printing
- I have made an example 42″ x 21″ poster. LastnameF_poster-21
- You can use this powerpoint as a template and start from there. Fill in your data and your text and change it as needed. Add your own departmental logos!
- Do not add background color or background picture as those are hard to print. For example do not make the poster black. Or do not make the poster into a big picture of New York City. These posters look great but we don’t have enough toner or the time to print them.
- Please do add lots of color to your graphs and pictures to help the poster.
- When I print the poster I will need a pdf file. So when you hand in the poster you will turn in a pdf file. To do this go to save as in powerpoint and choose a pdf.
Poster Session:
- The poster session is really fun. Anytime you can talk to your colleagues about data and results; just enjoy it. Offer ideas, be supportive, learn something.
- We will break up the class into 3 groups. One group will present their posters while the two other two groups go around and talk to the presenters. We will repeat this three times, 20 minutes each. For example for 20 minutes group 1 will present while groups 2 and 3 walk around looking at the posters and asking questions.
- you will provide feedback to the presenters. For four posters you will present a “glow” and a “grow”. Think about what you would like someone to tell you to help you improve.
Goals and Grading Rubric
- I will ask each person to give feedback on how they felt they did on the final project.
- I want each person to really try to get into the data.
- Did you try to understand it?
- Were you able to get it read in and manipulated?
- Were you able to make plots of the data?
- Did you hit a wall but then work out how to get around it?
- Were you able to make an iPython notebook that explained what you did and that analyzed the data?
- Is the iPython notebook self explanatory?
- Your final iPython notebook and data
- was it well commented with comments and markdown?
- was it easy to follow and understand?
- did it work?
- were the figures “pretty”?
- Were you able to use what you learned this semester on a real world problem and data set?
- I am going to make a poster grading rubric based on the elements above. Every student is going to have to comment on and give feedback on 4 other posters.
Poster Session
- The poster session is going to be held on the time allotted for finals.
- Here is the poster session Rubric we will use to critique posters. PosterSessionRubric
Students and Their Projects
- Student 1
- Student 2
Groupby
- Many data sets have subgroups in them. This happens as our data sets get bigger. You will want to compare different groups within a data set. This could be by many things but examples include different wells, different sampling locations, different days, different people. The list is endless.
- This is similar to the idea of Pivot Tables. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pivot_table
- Pulling out parts of data sets can be tedious with if statements.
- Luckily Pandas makes it easy. The function you need is groupby. He is an example online
- I also made a short notebook to show you how it works. Here is the notebook and here is an excel file but you will have to change the name or get the data on github.
The final project was one of the most fun and challenging endeavors we tackled in the class. Giving us complete freedom to pursue a topic and acquire data that interested us, and leaving us with the recognition that “everyone will get as far as they get” – these were strangely liberating instead of intimidating instructions. I enjoyed having to prioritize the direction of my analyses and was able to keep generating ideas for relationships in the data to investigate…I only wish my technical ability in Python were more developed so that I could have been more efficient in the program and concatenated some of the many other datasets I’d discovered to extend my research questions. It was sometimes difficult to be able to draw out a plot I wanted to make, then spend hours down the rabbit holes of Stack Overflow trying to interpret out the syntax for reproducing it in Python.
Even though I still feel that what was represented on my poster appears superficial in terms of how I wrangled the data, I thoroughly enjoyed communicating the motivation for the project and the results to my audience, and felt empowered by selling the work I did get to do, despite the many ways it can be deepened and improved in future. Thanks for a really awesome semester!!!
I think when you come up with the questions on your own it helps you see the power of all them methods.
I really liked working on this final project, and it was great to have almost two full weeks to work on it in class as well. As someone who has never made a poster before, I would have appreciated a little more guidance on the writing part necessary in a poster.
I really enjoyed the format of the final project for this class – it was really great to have to freedom to use the tools we’ve gained from this class and apply them to a research project of our choosing. It was very helpful having class time to work on the project, and I never felt too overwhelmed or confused by the project. I loved the way presentations went; the environment was very stress-free and it was actually very fun to talk to other people about their final posters and how they went about analyzing their data. It was also very gratifying to be able to present my own poster and take pride in the work that I did.
I really enjoyed this project in that we had class time to work on it and receive help and also had the freedom to pick a topic we were interested in. This also gave us the opportunity to learn a few more python tools like groupby, which really transformed the way you are able to manipulate data and make it show exactly what you want, and from any perspective of the data. I know we only have limited time but I found this skill super interesting and could totally see how useful this would be for future projects or other data sets. Super cool.
By far, this was the best assignment of the semester! We were given creative freedom on the coding and poster-making aspects. I really enjoyed being able to use code we learned from different parts of the semester to analyze my final data set. A major plus was being able to use this final project for my senior thesis.
I really enjoyed this final project and the opportunity to apply all the concepts we learned in this class, especially because we got to choose a topic we were interested in. I believe this project was super helpful in prepping for future research projects/jobs we may have and exposing us the process of poster making and presenting.
I really enjoyed this projected as Brian gave us the freedom to choose whatever we wanted (to a certain extent) which meant that I was able to really delve into a topic which interested me and that meant that I was willing to put more work into it. I thought it was great how we were able to dedicate 2 weeks worth of class time into this as I was able to get lots done whilst being able to ask questions as soon as I found myself in a muddle. It really had me reflecting on how much I had learnt since the beginning of the semester as I had to use the code learnt in class and incorporate into real research and data analysis without any training wheels. Overall a great way to conclude and solidify knowledge acquired!
Definitely a highlight of the class. I really enjoyed the opportunity of applying all the things we learned in this class to one final project and having the creative freedom to explore what you were interested in. This is important because in research opportunities and even in the real world, there won’t necessarily be a list of things to do as we’ve had in homeworks, and we need to determine for ourselves what type of graphs to create and analyses to perform. Maybe a little more time to work on it would have been helpful. Looking forward to seeing how the presentations go!
Another suggestion:
3. Review past programming tricks before going into the project to reduce road blocks along the way
Skills I learnt:
1. How to create a scientific poster
2. How to manipulate and process plots in python
3. How to apply programming skills and tricks from previous lessons to the project
Suggestions:
1. More time to work on the projects
2. Not clear how much analysis to include because I was not working with my own data set so my background knowledge of the content was sparse.
I really enjoyed making the posters. As a non-science person, I didn’t think that I would ever be able to make a poster. I thought that it was a lot of fun to do, but also helped me think through my data and learn how to explain it. I think that what would have helped me more was a more detailed description about what each section needed, and how to properly format it. I had some trouble figuring out how much detail I needed to go into.
The poster session was amazing and I had so much fun presenting! I think poster presentations are more effective than powerpoint presentations because it’s interesting to go around and talk to people and question them about their research without being pressed for time. I would definitely recommend poster presentations for future python classes.
Also, I think we had just the right number of classes to work on the poster presentations, I was able to complete all of the python work for my poster during class time.
I wish we had more time to work on these projects. Maybe already start on some ideas and datasets immediately mid way through the term? At least reading in files and making basic correlations if data set allows it. But otherwise, really enjoyed taking the time to make a scientific poster. Will need that for myself when I’m making my senior thesis poster next semester! 🙂 Thank you!