UW-Eau Claire students, faculty put hundreds of research projects on display

Apr. 29—EAU CLAIRE — When Spencer Keith gave his girlfriend a Fitbit — a smart watch with a pedometer and other functions that track physical activity — for Christmas, he also thought about getting something like that of his own.

But instead of buying a wristwatch-shaped gadget, the UW-Eau Claire senior majoring in computer science wondered what it would take to build one.

Not the first to make a homemade smart watch, Keith found that some of the components and free plans to make components were online.

"You'd be amazed how affordable something like this is to put together," he said.

The key piece of the watch, a postage-stamp size screen with a circuit board integrated into it, cost him about $20. Other parts cost less, namely a small battery, a device used to keep time when the watch is powered down, a 3-D printed case and a bracelet his girlfriend gave him that serves as a makeshift watchband.

To assemble the watch, Keith, who primarily is interested in computers' software, had to teach himself a little about making hardware.

"I had never soldered before this project," he said.

Once he built the watch, he loaded programs he wrote onto it. Aside from keeping time, it also has a stopwatch function, keep Keith's personal to-do list and display real-time weather data from an online service. After he's done with numerous other class projects, he's looking forward to tinkering more with the watch this summer to program more functions into it.

"I really found my passion with computer science, and I always look for new projects to undertake," he said.

Keith was among hundreds of UW-Eau Claire students who showed off research they've been doing in recent semesters under the mentorship of university faculty in the weeklong event called Celebration of Excellence in Research + Creative Activity.

About 250 student-faculty research projects from the university were displayed in posters and through presentations at Davies Center on the UW-Eau Claire campus. Research teams from neighboring Chippewa Valley Technical College were also invited to participate and brought 16 projects to CERCA.

The projects had students go beyond their classroom studies to probe into research topics both big and small. Some projects focused on investigating traits of tiny molecules while other students explored topics that affect the campus, the Eau Claire community, Wisconsin and even the entire world.

As it was during last year's CERCA, the COVID-19 pandemic again was the subject of numerous research projects. The pandemic's effects on mental health, senior care, children's literacy, opinions on vaccines and trust in institutions were studied.

Anna Zank, a sophomore math major, has been crunching data on coronavirus case numbers, hospitalization rates and other statistics since she first began studying at UW-Eau Claire.

"I was starting school when it just got going," she said.

For the research project she did under the mentorship of mathematics Professor Jessica Kraker, Zank looked at hospitalization rates in Wisconsin relative to when new COVID-19 variants came out and when different segments of the population became eligible for vaccinations.

"I thought it was very relevant to the actual world," Zank said of the data-driven research.

Part of the project involved data pulled daily from the state Department of Health Services website. As a wave of the omicron variant of COVID-19 hit early this year, Kraker and Zank were able to graph out the rate of hospitalization for it in real-time. And as health officials were advising the public, the student and professor could see a clear trend on their graph showing that omicron did indeed have a much lower hospitalization rate than prior variants.

With a fellowship covering two years of research ending, Zank said she did appreciate the chance to pursue learning outside the classroom in a topic that interested her.

"The overall research experience is so interesting because it is self-guided," she said.

Other projects at the research fair weren't quite as weighty as a worldwide pandemic, but still had students applying their academic skills, delving into interesting topics and preparing for their careers.

Ryan Fries, a junior studying actuarial science, analyzed whether it is financially feasible to create insurance for people who pay to play fantasy football to get their league fees back if their best players are injured.

While there are some internet-based companies that do actually offer fantasy sports league insurance, Fries found there wasn't much publicly-available research into such products.

"We took our own exploration of it because there wasn't much research at the time," said Fries, who was mentored by mathematics Professor Herschel Day for the research project.

The research idea was among those Day, who had experienced an injury-related setback in one of his past fantasy football teams, had suggested as a possibility for Fries to do.

The student saw the appeal of the project as he's also felt the sting of drafting players for his fantasy team that miss games because they are hurt.

"I've always enjoyed playing," Fries said. "It's not fun when your top players get injured."

So for the top 75 or so NFL players drafted in past years that are still playing, he began calculating their risks of getting injured. The risk model he went with included players' past history of injuries, age and positions they play.

"At one point we referenced data all the way back to 2000," Fries said.

He then had a computer simulate 1,000 different player drafts for previous years and got actual injury data for players picked on those teams to check his risk calculations for a hypothetical insurance product.

"Over time it could potentially be profitable," he said. But he added that injuries to just a few popular players in one year could result in a big loss for the insurer to pay policyholders.

Fries said using fantasy football as a research topic was fun, but the project also is something that allowed him to work on something he could face in his post-college career.

"As a student it helped me explore a real-world situation: creating an insurance product basically from scratch," he said. "It helped me learn the concepts so I could relate it to a real-world topic."