1. Connecting a seemingly similar history to a surprisingly variable present

With this project, I would examine how a set of nations (a subset of Scandinavian nations) that are today relatively homogeneous in terms of race and economic capacity have vastly differing attitudes and policies around immigration and integration of immigrants. This interest developed as I was reading about Iceland’s policies around immigration before visiting there, and being struck by it’s vastly open immigration policy. Part of the reason this was so striking to me was it’s proximity to nations that in comparison, are very closed to immigration. I am yet to find the serious Computer Science in this project, but I am hoping that in learning more about the question I am trying to ask, I am helping myself find the Computer Science tools I could use to answer it.

2. Analyzing twitter data to study emotional health as tied to disordered eating

Social media is in our homes, and in our kitchens. This project would be an advent into studying twitter data about eating preferences. With information about healthy eating at everyone’s finger tips, it’s easy to get pulled into the 1234 fad diets that are popular on the interwebs on any given day. Through this project, I would study how patterns in popularity of fad diets affect dietary preferences as projected on twitter. Disordered eating is on the rise in the US, as is veganism. The question I will be trying to ask in this project is whether so called lifestyle changes(such as switching to a vegan lifestyle) have become the ad-hoc way of normlising disordered eating, and whether this phenomenon is discoverable through twitter data.