Social Computing Final Project

To connect what you learn in this course to your current experiences and given the high relevance of social computing topics to what is happening during the pandemic, the topic of your final project focuses on How Social Computing Technologies can Support Individuals and/or Communities during a Pandemic. Within this general theme, you can decide the focus of your project.

You have three options in terms of methods to use in your project. Your methods can be a combination of two of these as well (they often do):

• Qualitative study

  This method involves conducting an in-depth study regarding your specific topics, using methods such as interviews, focus groups, or content-analysis.

  Example 1:
  Topic of interest: Socializing under pandemic
  Approach: Conduct an interview study among 20 participants from different age groups to understand what technologies they have been using to keep in touch with friends, what were the strength and weaknesses of each technology, what would improve their experiences, and where do our current technologies stand in support of online socializing.
  

  Example 2:
  Topic of interest: Understanding the discussion around the topic of wearing masks on social media in the US and over time
  Approach: Collect a set of most popular social media posts during first 4 months of the pandemic related on the topic of mask, hand code important concepts, and identify emerging themes

• Large scale data analysis

  This method involves analysis of existing large scale datasets such as Twitter or other social media dataset to understand the problem you are trying to study. You can either use an existing dataset or use APIs to retrieve the data.

  Example 1:
  Topic of interest: Collaborative knowledge creating about the pandemic on Wikipedia
  Approach: Using Wikipedia API to extract all the edits to key pages related to the pandemic on Wikipedia to understand how the Wikipedia editors across different language communities have been creating collective knowledge about the pandemic

  Example 2:
  Topic of interest: Differences of discussion of the pandemic in different countries
  Approach: Using social media APIs and computational methods such as language and network analysis, collect and analyze data on how the pandemic had been discussed over time in key affected countries, using the language as the proxy for location (e.g. German, Italian, Spanish, and English)

• Design

  This methods involves design and prototyping of a social computing system as a solution to the problem you are studying in your project.

  Example 1:
  Topic of interest: motivating citizens to follow rules about wearing masks and social distancing
  Approach: designing an add-on to Facebook to utilize methods of persuasive communication in changing users behavior

  Example 2:
  Topic of interest: supporting local communities in face of pandemic
  Approach: designing a community-based system to allow residents of neighborhoods to support each other, providing a low-demand, safe, and secure way for those in need to submit request and be matched with others who can help them

Team formation

There is a strong evidence that teams with diversity of experiences, demographics, and skills perform better. In forming your team, consider these factors. To accomodate the pandemic circumstances, I recommend smaller teams of two or three members. There will be support provided by the instructor to help you form your teams.

Deliverables

Deadlines for each item is posted in the syllabus of the class

1. Idea generation

   Each student is required to submit 2 ideas for projects. For all qualified ideas (reviewed by the instructor), all the students will then vote on how interesting, how relevant, and how feasible each idea is. Therefore, using the process of collective wisdom of the class, we then pick the most interesting and most feasible topics. You do not have to work on the idea you proposed if you like another idea better.

2. Initial project proposal

   Your team need to provide a one-page project proposal which should include a brief description of the idea, the project methods, resources needed to complete the project, and the responsibility of each team member

3. Midterm progress report

   A 15 min presentation to report on the progress of the project, receive feedback on the progress, and discuss any challenges faced to complete the project

4. Final project pitch, a poster, and a final report

   • A 3 min project pitch highlighting most important and interesting results of the project
   • A poster describing the project in more details.

5. Final report

   Final report inculding details of the project not covered in the poster, e.g. details of data and data collection.