T1–  ::Data Mining, analysis and prediction 

This survey paper will first look at the tools used to gather and store data from user and other domains. It will then look at how, in the past, others have worked with data to make co-relations and predictions. It will then look attempt to look at publicly available data and try to find correlation with other market data. Our focus here will be to see the extent to which one data can be abstractly analyzed and linked to others and with what degree of certainty. It will involve working with a lot of data and analyzing it to find trends and patterns and possibly making predictions.

Topic 2 – CS for Social Change and Sustainability

Every year the different branches of campus such as Health Services, facilities, Public Safety, ITS and the registrar’s office send out emails to students that are lengthy reports which no one ever reads. Earlham facilities keep records on energy consumption that the students seldom look at and every now and then there are issues around campus that divides the student body but students rarely get to vote on.

To address these problems I suggest a mobile survey app that allows students to vote on issues as well as view various data from departments around the campus. These survey results and data will also be dynamically displayed on screens around the campus. It would involve learning and implementing graphic interface tools as well as visualization programs. If we link this through quadratics (as is done for student government voting), we can make sure that only Earlham students get to vote and each student gets to vote only once.

The ability to view data and trends on key statistics across from these departments would certainly help the students in a better-informed position and in a place to bring change.

T3 – CS for all

As I see my Econ professors struggle with STATA (a simple tool to work with data through commands), I cannot help but draw parallels on how it first felt to learn programming. Reality is that most people without a CS background have difficulty in learning these new tools and softwares. Softwares, most of which are outdated in their use, but, are still taught to students who usually resort to memorizing them to pass midterms. I think that it would be very helpful if we as CS students can help discover, learn, teach as well as document these softwares and help other departments. I propose an interactive interface like Code-academy where students are given tutorials that go progressively forward in complexity. Co-ordination from these departments would be essential to understand their needs and create an interface catered to help their students learn from scratch.

{ possible additions could be log-in mechanism via moodle to ensure students are spending the amount of time they should be taking these interactive courses”}