The purpose of this website is to provide recent and ongoing information for CU Denver Math Clinic, instructed by Prof. Fournier since 2019 spring.
Math Clinic provides students with valuable experience applying their knowledge and skills to solving "real-world" data-science or scientific-computation problems i.e., those provided by external sponsors from government, industry, non-profit or other organizations. Students use AI accountably (including prompts and other provenance, to enable reproducibility), effectively (implying accurately, but also with fitness-for-purpose —not overkill) and skeptically (including testing-to-failure in some way so sponsors understand the limitations).
- Each sponsor:
- describes their problem in an initial meeting (in person or by Zoom);
- helps define deliverable outcomes (usually over e-mail exchanges);
- contributes to the operational expense of the clinic (contribution TBD);
- provides data, formulas etc. (as appropriate); and then has the options to
- execute a contract with Statement of Work and specific Deliveries, and
- interact with a Math Clinic team (2 to 3 graduate or senior undergraduate students to devote at least 180 hours each over the semester) as much or little as sponsor chooses.
- Each team learns to:
- listen to their sponsor;
- compose a formal Project Proposal;
- conduct applied data science research dynamically i.e., without knowing in advance all the mathematical, statistical, computational etc. methods that might be required;
- learn or refresh those methods partly independently;
- compose Python code and Jupyter notebooks to analyze the data and solve the problem, using AI accountably, effectively and skeptically (see above); and
- compose professional-quality, extensive code and AI documentation (notebook Markdown cells including mathematical formulations) embedded in software that reproduces the results.
- Professor Fournier manages all these activities, drawing upon his experience with various research topics and purposes in academia and industry since 1997. He especially focuses on matching sponsor's needs with students' abilities, to ensure all participants are satisfied.
General and historical information about Math Clinic may be found by clicking around this site.