Background

There are dozens of movies released every year – far more than any single person (or even a group of people) can expect to keep up with. While there are websites such as IMDB that allow users to search for facts and information about movies, these sites do not also look for relationships between movies. Having access to such a database would provide both academics and film enthusiasts with a new resource for examining connections between movies – from the words in similar scenes to the colors that were used across a movie.

In such a system, a key feature is the ability to search and navigate easily. By including as many relations as possible for users to search on, we can guarantee that there will be a wealth of information that becomes available to them for analysis. Similarly, making it easy for users to navigate through the database (and even upload films that they wish to be able to analyze) will make the database more accessible and applicable to everyone. Both of these features will make the online database invaluable to anyone who has the desire to examine connections and parallels between different films.

Executive Summary

This project has already been started as a web application and that is certainly the best medium for it, due to the fact that it will provide the most people access on the most devices. At the moment, the data and search functionality are displayed through simple web pages, which could be brought more to life with a reactive interface that would better present the information pertinent to a user’s search, while still allowing them to view more information if desired. By removing visual pains of searching through the data, there is an increased chance of the tool being useful as desired.

There should also be a feature for uploading new movies, which would allow the server to automatically pull data from movie files (screenshots, subtitles, etc) and could even have the images taken analyzed by a computer-vision program to retrieve information such as objects in the image from them, allowing for more meaningful searches and relational matches. By automating the submission process, we would lower the work required to submit films to the system, making users more likely to submit films (thereby expanding the breadth of the database).

Viability Analysis

As with any cloud-hosted database, the cost of hosting will increase with the number of movies that are held in it. The images themselves would be the largest files, ranging from 2KB to 10KB after compression. Even with such compression, however, there will be cost constraints associated with the number of movies that can be held in the database while operating within a reasonable budget. Another constraint will come from the use of any sort of remote library for image analysis. The majority of libraries that will be able to successfully analyze the images for metadata in the database will have some cost associated with them (see the Google Vision API as an example). Finally, we may also wish to consider creating a local application that users could download for parsing movies so the size of files that have to be uploaded are drastically reduced in size.

Risks and Rewards

This project has one primary issue that comes with it, which is the legality of the use of movies. The movie industry is known for aggressively defending its copyrights and going after people for violating them. Because the database uses only screenshots, however, this hopefully should  not be an issue with fair use laws. Having users upload movies themselves might be another grey area legally, due to the sharing of content that (in most cases) was purchased for personal use. There is a good chance it would be safe under fair use, but it is certainly a grey area that must be examined and addressed if necessary. This would certainly need to be looked into.

The benefits of the project, on the other hand, are significant. Having access to a massive relational database of movies with extra metadata associated with them will allow film buffs and scholars to make connections between plots and scenes where they might have not been able to before. This could be a massive boon to the film studies field as it could provide insights that were never before considered.

Closing

The film database that is being created will certainly be a revolutionary tool for scholars and film buffs everywhere. To make it truly useful, however, it needs to have comprehensive search and uploading features that are accessible through a friendly and reactive interface, all of which this project will add to the database. All of our team members are very interested in furthering such a database’s accessibility, because there is such a wealth of information that such a project will add to the field of film studies, and we are excited by the possibilities that it could unleash.

Team Members

Eric Marshall

Cole Whitley

Stefano Cobelli

Andrew Capuano

Background

In the modern world, everything we do can be shared with our friends, family, and acquaintances through the use of social media. This allows us to share ideas and thoughts seamlessly with those we care about. There currently is no good place, however, to discover, book, and share travel ideas. This is where Excursion finds its market. Creating a socially-interconnected travel platform would allow people to share their travel plans and ideas with their friends and family. Essential to such a system is an easy-to-use uploading feature and efficient backend. Thus, the true problem to be solved in this project is the creation and streamlining of a system that is friendly to users as well as quick and responsive.

Executive Summary

For Excurvant, as with any social platform, one of the most important features is accessibility to its users. Even further, in the modern world, smartphones and laptops are ubiquitous. The one application that is common to all of these devices is the web browser. Because this is an application that will need to be accessible on all sorts of devices, the clear choice for a platform is a web app, allowing any browser to use the application (therefore gaining the largest possible audience). As has been seen with previous social applications, one of the hardest parts of such a platform is gaining users.

To make it as easy as possible for someone to sign up, the application will allow users to authenticate through common social accounts, such as their existing Google or Facebook account. This will make it easy for new members to join and begin sharing with their friends/family. To create the necessary infrastructure for such a web app, we will need to create a backend (Node.JS was specified) that includes a server for the application itself, as well as a database for any trips and sharing relationships created by the application. This will allow the application to manage and track relationships between its users, perhaps even suggesting who they might like to share trips with or create a feed of users who have shared similar trips. On the UI side, we will need to design an interface that is fast and easy to use – most likely meaning that we will have to make several iterations of the user interface to improve on each iteration.

Viability Analysis

The tasks involved with this project are certainly attainable, but it is by no means a minor project. The design of a user interface alone is no small feat, and there will need to be a significant infrastructure put in place to handle the requests associated with a reactive web application.

The first task will be creating a server with which we can serve the necessary javascript and html for an application – this should be fairly quick to set up, however, we will also need to decide on and set up a database that is scalable for the application once it reaches full load which could take longer to do. Second, we would need to set up an API (Application Programming Interface) for communicating between the web application and server from a user’s browser. This will take a good deal longer as the use cases for the product will need to be flushed out and pathways designed/created to serve the application. The next major task would involve designing the user interface that can be then created in a given Javascript framework – this is almost guaranteed to be the longest and most involved as it will involve designing a user interface and iterating on each design to improve usability.

The project also calls for improving the user experience. Through classes we have taken at Bucknell (HCI, Mobile Development) and our own personal findings, we should be able to design a user interface that is practical, easy to use, and impactful.

Risks and Rewards

This is a unique application as there is currently no popular application that allows its users to plan and share trips with friends and family, which could aid people in the planning of future vacations and trips. On the other hand, as is true with any data-based application, it could open the users to potential theft if their trip data is gained by a malicious party, so any data must be kept securely wherever it is held, as well as transmitted in a secure fashion.

Another risk with this application that can be seen with essentially any social media app is that it would need to get a large following in order for it to have any value. This would involve large amounts of capital to fund marketing campaigns. While this is more of the customer’s problem, it is something to keep in mind when thinking about the viability and usefulness of what we build. If a working product is completed before the end of our senior year, the client might consider a closed test period with bucknell students.

Closing

This application could be absolutely revolutionary for the travel industry. It has become clear in recent years that there is a massive potential for any social application because it lets people integrate the platform into their lives, increasing its value to them. As such, the application has huge potential to gain a large following and user base, making it an extremely valuable idea.

Team Members

Eric Marshall

Cole Whitley

Stefano Cobelli

Andrew Capuano

Background

There are dozens of movies released every year – far more than any single person (or even a group of people) can expect to keep up with. While there are websites such as IMDB that allow users to search for facts and information about movies, these sites do not also look for relationships between movies. Having access to such a database would provide both academics and film enthusiasts with a new resource for examining connections between movies – from the words in similar scenes to the colors that were used across a movie.

In such a system, a key feature is the ability to search and navigate easily. By including many possible relations for users to search on, we can guarantee that there will be a wealth of information that becomes available to them. Similarly, making it easy for users to navigate through the database (and even upload films that they wish to be able to analyze) will make the database more accessible and applicable to everyone. Both of these features will make the online database invaluable to anyone who has the desire to examine connections and parallels between different films.

Executive Summary

This project has already been started as a web application and that is certainly the best medium for it, due to the fact that it will provide the most people access on the most devices. At the moment, the data and search functionality are displayed through simple web pages, which could be brought more to life with a reactive interface that would better present the information pertinent to a user’s search, while still allowing them to view more information if desired.

There should also be a feature for uploading new movies, which would allow for the server to automatically pull data from movie files (screenshots, subtitles, etc) and could even have the images taken analyzed by a computer-vision program to retrieve information such as objects in the image from them, allowing for more meaningful searches and relational matches.

Viability Analysis

As with any cloud-hosted database, the cost of hosting will increase with the number of movies that are held in it. Thus, there will be cost constraints associated with the number of movies that can be held in the database while operating within a reasonable budget. Another constraint will come from any sort of remote library for image analysis. The majority of libraries that will be able to successfully analyze the images for metadata in the database will have some cost associated with them (see the Google Vision API as an example). Finally, for uploading we may also wish to consider creating a local application for parsing movies so the size of files that have to be uploaded are drastically reduced in size.

Risks and Rewards

This project has one primary legal exposure with it, involving the use of movies. The movie industry is known for aggressively defending its copyrights and going after people for violating them. Because the database uses only screenshots, however, this should not be an issue with fair use laws. The benefits, on the other hand are significant. Having access to a massive relational database of movies with extra metadata associated with them will allow film buffs and scholars to make connections where they might have not before.

Closing

The film database that is being created will certainly be a revolutionary tool for scholars and film buffs everywhere. To make it truly useful, however, it needs to have comprehensive search and uploading features that are accessible through a friendly and reactive interface, all of which this project will add to the database.

Background

In the modern world, data is everything. From farming to space exploration, there are few industries that do not rely on large amounts of data, and furthermore the representation of large data visually. One of the most common places for consumers to find data visualizations, however, is in news articles. As data becomes an ever more important facet of life, more and more news organizations are delving into the realm of data visualization. At this point, with so many things being represented, however, there has been very little study done into the reactions people have emotionally to the data visualizations.

Using new libraries that involve webcams and other sensors, however, may allow for programs to read (and possibly adapt to) the reactions that users have to the data they are viewing. By incorporating such technology into web pages that contain visualizations, companies would be able to further understand how the data being portrayed is affecting their user base. There is currently no method for gathering and utilizing such data, however, leaving the space open to innovation.

Executive Summary

By far the most common place for consumers to run across data visualizations is on the web. As such, the most extensive platform to pull data from would be within a web-based library that could utilize the computer’s webcam to analyze the emotions of the user as they are viewing a webpage-based data visualization. Because the goal of the system is to be able to actively gauge whether the user is looking at a visualization and then examine their emotional reaction, it will have to know when the user is actually looking at the visualization and be able to recognize when the user’s gaze has shifted, so that it can stop collecting emotional data. This will keep the collection to only data that actually pertains to the desired state, and means that there does not have to be someone who will pull only relevant data after the fact.

Once the data is collected, there will be a suite of visualizations and analysis that can then be applied to that data, which will help news organizations to further understand the impact of their data representations and improve them both in the future and in real-time, allowing for more effective representations and displays. By giving such a tool to news organizations and companies, we will be enabling them to create more meaningful graphics and information in the future.

Viability Analysis

There are lots of issues that we will come across, the first of which will be recognizing the position that a user is examining on the screen and recognizing when it is or is not a data visualization. Another issue that will be run into will be the actual recognition of emotions through the sensors that are available, and to associate that emotion with the currently viewed data visualization. Finally, we will need to figure out how the data can be best put into other visualizations so that it can be utilized by news organizations.

Risks and Rewards

The first and foremost of the issues associated with this project are primarily involving the privacy of the subjects. So long as there is a camera fixed on them gathering data, there is the possibility of sacrificing the user’s privacy. As such, all data involved in the system must be encrypted. Another, slightly more worrying risk of this project is the potential for its use in emotional manipulation. Because news organizations would be privy to the emotional states of their users as they view given data visualizations, it would then be more possible for them to figure out how to manipulate their viewers, opening the door to ethical dilemmas.

The rewards that could come from this, however, could revolutionize the news and data visualization industries significantly. By being able to adapt how data is represented based on users’ emotional reactions, they could learn to represent data in ways that will more meaningfully convey the information it represents.

Closing

In designing a web library to analyze emotion we could potentially unlock a whole new level of personalized informational media – data visualizations could potentially be manipulated to normalize people’s emotions and allow for more neutral representations – paving the way for a world of better, more personal information

Background

In the modern world, everything we do can be shared with our friends, family, and acquaintances through the use of social media. This allows us to share ideas and thoughts seamlessly with those we care about. There currently is no good place, however, to discover, book, and share travel ideas. This is where Excursion finds its market. Creating a socially-interconnected travel platform would allow people to share their travel plans and ideas with their friends and family. Essential to such a system is an easy-to-use uploading feature and efficient backend. Thus, the true problem to be solved in this project is the creation and streamlining of a system that is friendly to users as well as quick and responsive.

Executive Summary

For Excurvant, as with any social platform, one of the most important features is accessibility to its users. Even further, in the modern world, smartphones and laptops are ubiquitous. The one application that is common to all of these devices is the web browser. Because this is an application that will need to be accessible on all sorts of devices, the clear choice for a platform is a web app, allowing any browser to use the application (therefore gaining the largest possible audience). As has been seen with previous social applications, one of the hardest parts of such a platform is gaining users. To make it as easy as possible for someone to sign up, the application will allow users to authenticate through common social accounts, such as their existing Google or Facebook account. This will make it easy for new members to join and begin sharing with their friends/family. To create the necessary infrastructure for such a web app, we will need to create a backend (Node.JS was specified) that includes a server for the application itself, as well as a database for any trips and sharing relationships created by the application. This will allow the application to manage and track relationships between its users, perhaps even suggesting who they might like to share trips with or create a feed of users who have shared similar trips. On the UI side, we will need to design an interface that is fast and easy to use – most likely meaning that we will have to make several iterations of the user interface to improve on each iteration.

Viability Analysis

The tasks involved with this project are certainly attainable, but it is by no means a minor project. The design of a user interface alone is no small feat, and there will need to be a significant infrastructure put in place to handle the requests associated with a reactive web application. The first task will be creating a server with which we can serve the necessary javascript and html for an application – this should be fairly quick to set up, however, we will also need to decide on and set up a database that is scalable for the application once it reaches full load which could take longer to do. Second, we would need to set up an API (Application Programming Interface) for communicating between the web application and server from a user’s browser. This will take a good deal longer as the use cases for the product will need to be flushed out and pathways designed/created to serve the application. The next major task would involve designing the user interface that can be then created in a given Javascript framework – this is almost guaranteed to be the longest and most involved as it will involve designing a user interface and iterating on each design to improve usability.

Risks and Rewards

This is a unique application as there is currently no popular application that allows its users to plan and share trips with friends and family, which could aid people in the planning of future vacations and trips. On the other hand, as is true with any data-based application, it could open the users to potential theft if their trip data is gained by a malicious party, so any data must be kept securely wherever it is held, as well as transmitted in a secure fashion.

Closing

This application could be absolutely revolutionary for the travel industry. It has become clear in recent years that there is a massive potential for any social application because it lets people integrate the platform into their lives, increasing its value to them. As such, the application has huge potential to gain a large following and user base, making it an extremely valuable idea.

Eric Marshall