Social Computing Final Project

Project description

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 Pandemic and Social Computing Technologies. Within this general theme, you can decide the focus of your project. Your project will involve design and prototyping of a social computing application and includes the following steps:

1. Identifying a problem: keep the problem small and focused. An example problem can be "how to use social technologies to motivate people to follow rules about wearing masks and social distancing" or "how social technologies can be best utilized to organize local support in face of pandemic challenges."
2. Exploring existing solutions related to the problem: this involves a review of existing social computing systems and applications.
3. Elaborating the problem and motivating the importance of addressing the problem: this involves literature review, each member of the group is required to find two papers and review them.
4. Designing the solution: this involves team analysis of the problem and discussion on requirement of the solution, and designing the initial ideas as sketches and storyboards.
5. Evaluating the solution: this involves presenting the initial design ideas to 5 people and collect their feedback. These people can be your family or friends as long as they are the right users for the application you are designing.
6. Revising your design: this involves re-designing your initial design based on the feedback you received in the evaluation step.

Team formation

This is a group project, and you are advised to form group of 3 as that size works the best in terms of distribution of effort and coordination. There is a strong evidence that teams with diversity of experiences, demographics, and skills perform better. In forming your team, consider these factors. 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

   A short write-up including elaborated description of the focus problem of your project and review of existing solutions related to the problem.

3. Literature review presentation and initial design ideas

   A 15 min presentation of papers reviewed by the team in relation to the problem including synthesize of what you have learned from those papers and how they will inform your design and your initial analysis of requirement and needs for your application.

4. Final project presentation

   A 15 min presentation of your final outcome of the project including the initial design, evaluation feedback, and re-design of the application.

5. Final report

   Final report including details of the project not covered in the presentation