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

1. I will ask each person to give feedback on how they felt they did on the final project.
2. I want each person to really try to get into the data.
   1. Did you try to understand it?
   2. Were you able to get it read in and manipulated?
   3. Were you able to make plots of the data?
   4. Did you hit a wall but then work out how to get around it?
3. Were you able to make an iPython notebook that explained what you did and that analyzed the data?
4. Is the iPython notebook self explanatory?
5. Your final iPython notebook and data
   1. was it well commented with comments and markdown?
   2. was it easy to follow and understand?
   3. did it work?
   4. were the figures “pretty”?
6. Were you able to use what you learned this semester on a real world problem and data set?
7. 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

1. The poster session is going to be held on the time allotted for finals.
2. Here is the poster session Rubric we will use to critique posters.  PosterSessionRubric

Students and Their Projects

1. Student 1
2. 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.