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Center of Excellence in Data Science

Capstone Partnership Program

Three Students and a professor in front of a presentation screen

Capstone/Practicum Projects

Capstone and practicum course students have successfully completed a rigorous set of upper-level undergraduate or graduate level coursework in computational statistics, data mining, machine learning and computational tools in data science. Since the program was launched in 2016, over 75 projects from 45 companies have been offered to students, spanning a broad range of industry segments including:

Marketing/Customer Analytics

Healthcare

Government/Public Agencies

Agriculture

Financial services

 

Want to Participate? Submit A Proposal:

In order to be considered for this program, companies and organizations should fill out the Capstone Proposal Form.

Questions? Contact:
Nick Koziol, Manager of Business Engagement and Communications of the New York State Center of Excellence in Data Science.
n.koziol@rochester.edu

Capstone Students on the Steps posing for a picture in front of a building

What to Expect:

As a partnering organization, you supply the data with which students engage in semester-long, team-based analytics projects. Students gain valuable experience working on real life problems while partnering organizations benefit from in-depth analysis conducted by students trained in contemporary data science techniques, equipped with state-of-the-art computational technology, and supported by faculty. Students tackle a wide range of research topics including, but not limited to:

Consumption Trends and Change Factors

Customer Analysis

Causality Analysis

Pricing/Demand Analysis

Preventative Maintenance

Text Mining in Social Media

The Process

Each project begins with the partnering company presentation highlighting the following:
• Business needs
• The goals of the data analytics effort
• A description of the available data

Requirements

There is no sponsorship fee or funding requirement to partner with us on a project.

Data

  • Business provides data for analysis
  • No personally identifiable information in the data sets or problem descriptions
  • Follows your organization’s 3rd party data transfer rules
  • Data sets must be accessible to students as flat file (CSV) or by remote access to company partner’s data base or data warehouse

Business Problem

  • Articulates clearly in a well-defined problem statement of one or two paragraphs
  • Requires statistical analysis or machine learning to solve (e.g. predictive modeling, data mining, knowledge discovery, statistical correlations, visualizations).
  • Calls for some exploratory analysis.
  • Calls for some data wrangling/munging.
  • Can be solved in programming languages like: R, Python, and Java.
  • Offers a contact who can communicate with student teams over the duration of the project.

Schedule

The capstone project course is typically held in the fall semester, while the practicum course is held in spring. Accordingly, the following deadlines are set for the respective courses:

Capstone Practicum
Partner Organization Engagement July 15 December 1
Project Kick-off Mid September Mid-February
Final Presentation Early December Early May