Dear APM115 friends,

Your final project is an individual project, yet similar to the third
one in that rather than us assigning it, you will be coming up with
your own idea.

As a general guideline, we encourage you to model a specific problem
motivated by your interests or by something you run into during your
everyday experience, rather than model some abstract scenario.  It is
always a good idea to acquire or use data for motivating, tuning or
testing the model, yet that is not required.

You will be asked to present your idea and planned modeling approach
in a 2-3 minutes talk during class on Tuesday and Thursday April 24,
26.  We may have another session for progress reports on May 1, 3.
The final 15 minute presentations for the final project will be during
reading period, on Wednesday and Thursday May 9 and 10.  We will
provide feedback on your first brief presentations, and be available
to help with the project itself.  Office hours for this purpose will
be announced.

You will also need to submit a paper on your final project, due on the
day of the final presentations.  The paper should be double spaced,
font size 12, up to 10 pages long not including figures, Matlab code
and references.  The paper should include an introduction with the
motivation and background, a model description section, a results and
analysis section, and a conclusions section.

While the subject of the final project is up to you, we encourage you
as always to consider all of the modeling tools we have experienced
during the course so far,

1) Delay differential equations
2) PDEs: e.g. wave eqn (see traffic) or a 1d or 2d diffusion equation
3) Markov processes
4) Stochastic terms in your model equations
5) Probabilistic approach, possibly including an equation for the
         Probability Distribution Function
6) Optimization principles
7) Cellular automata
8) ODEs

We very strongly encourage you to look carefully at the feedback
slides that were updated after the last presentation.  These slides
should be consulted when you plan your project, and then again when
you working on it, and finally when preparing the presentation:
http://www.DEAS.Harvard.edu/climate/eli/Courses/2007spring_a/Projects/Feedback_on_projects.ppt

You will need to email your Matlab code (if any) used for the project,
the presentation itself in pdf format, and the final paper in pdf
format to the TFs by May 9, 7am.

We hope you'll enjoy this and are as always happy to help you along
the way.  We will split the class on the days of the final
presentations, and you only need to come to the day during which you
will be presenting, but are expected to sit through all presentations
during that day (and participate with questions to the presenters!).

Looking forward to this,

best, Drew, Eli, Kurt, Michael.