[TOS] Question re. projects and courses related to social computational systems

[S. Monisha Pulimood]

Thanks Mel, for your response and suggestions. It's just in time as I am
finalizing plans for the semester that begins next week.

My own limited research into crowdsourcing type projects did not yield much
so I was thinking of having the students do something similar to one of
your suggestions, i.e. take an existing project and add on a social
computational solution to one of the problems. I'll keep you posted on how
that goes.

Perhaps I'll see you at the Grace Hopper conference in October ...

Monisha**
----------------------------------
Dr. S. Monisha Pulimood
Associate Professor
Dept. of Computer Science
225 Holman Hall
The College of New Jersey
2000 Pennington Rd
Ewing, NJ 08628
Tel: (609) 771 2788


On Wed, Aug 22, 2012 at 9:13 PM, Mel Chua <mel at purdue.edu> wrote:

>  In the fall I will be teaching an undergraduate course on social
>> computational systems (human computation a la Luis von Ahn's work on
>> Duolingo and reCaptcha, Amazon's Mechanical Turk, etc. as well as
>> crowdsourcing ...)
>>
>
>  Does anyone know of existing FOSS projects related to this topic area
>> that my students could get involved in?
>>
>
> This might be too late already, but I didn't want Monisha's note to pass
> without an answer.
>
> There don't seem to be any big FOSS projects on social computational
> systems (though I could be missing something). There *are* wrappers and
> interfaces to popular ones, like boto, http://docs.pythonboto.org/en/**
> latest/index.html <http://docs.pythonboto.org/en/latest/index.html>, a
> python interface to mechanical turk.
>
> My gut feel tells me that an open *content* project might make a better
> host for this sort of class -- or an open source software project that has
> a task that could be crowdsourced (bug triage, for instance). You could
> have students solve a problem for an open {source, content, hardware,
> culture, etc} community by implementing a social computational system,
> using things like boto to hook the pieces together.
>
> Alternatively, there are also FOSS projects that could be supercool if a
> social computational system was implemented in it. For instance, look at
> http://lwt.sourceforge.net, a multi-user webapp for learning how to read
> in a foreign language. Perhaps it might benefit from having a
> Duolingo-inspired feature added to it?
>
> That's what first comes to my mind, anyhow. Curious as to what you ended
> up doing!
>
> --Mel
>
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