Introduction and Motivation:
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Which project has your team chosen?
EthiCheck
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Why do you want to work on this project?
Global business currently operates without effective accountability. This has led to a proliferation of unfortunate and unethical business practices, like sweatshops, child labor, and reckless environmental destruction. Without an easy way to access information about these business practices, consumers are unable to effectively align their purchasing decisions to their beliefs, and this may cause consumers to support businesses practices that they may not wish to support.
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Explain the importance of your proposed design.
We believe consumers have begun to demand better production practices and transparency. The markets for fair trade, organic, ethical and environmentally friendly products are major growth markets, and have held steady even through the recent economic downturn. As consumers demand more products that meet their values, the market will change to meet that demand as socially irresponsible businesses lose customers to more responsible businesses. This could potentially shape the future of business practices.
Project Plan:
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Provide a general overview of your development tasks and their breakdown.
The project will be divided into two major parts: the website and the phone application. For the first part of the project we will focus on the website, its development, and the database. We will also look into several API’s in order to crawl different websites for useful information. Later in the semester we will concentrate on the phone application and that will mainly be a simplified version of the website with a barcode scanner capability.
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Provide the answers to any project-specific questions.
➢ How will the application be used? Include a user scenario that provides insight into the application's functionality.
The phone application is design to be use on-the-go so it will have a simple interface and will be easy to use. A person could go to a supermarket and scan the barcode of the product and the tool would recommend to buy or not depending on the algorithm. On the other hand, the website would have more extensive information on companies and would allow people to add information as well.
➢ What will be the main affordances of the mobile application?
The mobile application will be as simple and easy to use as possible in order to give the consumer a better experience. It would allow barcode reading or typing and would give back less information that the website.
➢ How will people add information and interact with the EthiCheck website?
It would work as a wiki in the sense that people would be able to add any type of information related to the social responsibility of a company. The information will need to be somehow checked before going live. Also, they could just search for any company/product and the information would be populated. We could also divide the information entered into the system into different categories.
➢ Where will the information on various companies be gathered from?
The information could come from several sources:
- Web: crawling specific websites utilizing different API’s to extract relevant information and process it.
- Ourselves: our team going online to websites and dumping as much data into the system as possible
- Input from companies themselves: get companies to fill out their own info and then invite their supporters and critics to come and edit it
- Wiki: later on the common user would be able to input information into the system
➢ How will you construct the algorithm for determining the social responsibility of a company?
We will probably use a classification algorithm (NaïveBayes.)
• Explain initial architecture and its components.
We will use MediaWiki to build our website and we have already bought a domain name (ethicheck.info.) A main theme for our project is information storage and retrieval. The algorithm that we will have to use to crawl wikipedia, NY Times etc. to retrieve the relevant information is a part of the data mining technology. We will be programming in C#.NET, and we might have to use PHP to design the website and tools like Silverlight and Microsoft XNA framework to design the app. Designing the website is our primary concern at this point.
Team Bio:
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For each team member, list relevant prior coursework, experience, and programming languages/toolkits that qualify you for this project.
Jaideep - I have never worked on the .NET framework or used PHP. But, I do have some familiarity with these languages. However, I had taken the information storage and retrieval class last semester and I have a rough idea about the algorithms and APIs to be used. Since we will be crawling databases to search for information and then store it on our database, we will need to know about databases. I had taken the intro class in databases and I think that knowledge might come in handy.
Carla - As Jaideep, I also took the information storage and retrieval class and as a final project I worked on a small subset of EthiCheck. I have also taken the intro class to databases, which I think will come in handy. I am actually not familiar with C# or the .NET framework, but I look forward to learning them. I have also always been very interested in social responsibility and I am an officer in two social justice organizations on campus. I think this experience allows me to think about the tool from the consumer perspective and not only from the programmer perspective.
Research Benefits:
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Intellectual Merit - How important is the proposed activity to advancing knowledge and understanding within its own field or across different fields? To what extent does the proposed activity suggest and explore creative and original concepts?
We are not aware of any commercially available tool with the same focus as our idea. There are a few websites that provide rankings of companies and products based on their social practices. However, these websites have different missions from our own and do not provide the user accessibility component and the wiki style that makes our idea unique.
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Broader Impact - How well does the activity advance discovery and understanding while promoting teaching, training, and learning? How well does the proposed activity broaden the participation of underrepresented groups (e.g., gender, ethnicity, disability, geographic, etc.)? To what extent will it enhance the infrastructure for research and education, such as facilities, instrumentation, networks, and partnerships? Will the results be disseminated broadly to enhance scientific and technological understanding? What may be the benefits of the proposed activity to society?
Our project aims to have a broader impact in several ways. In particular, by addressing several of the Millennium Development Goals of the UN. Here is how we envisioned the benefits of our project based on that:
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Environmental Sustainability - Our product will help ensure environmental sustainability by promoting ethical products and providing consumers with the means to demand companies to be ethical by exercising their purchasing power.
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Global Partnership – By demanding ethical companies the consumers will be shaping the future of business practices for the better and potentially improving millions of lives in many different countries around the world.
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Gender Equality/ End Poverty and Hunger – The envisioned final goal of the project is to facilitate a chain of events that could somehow improve the life of people around the world that are affected by unethical practices.
These goals would essentially be affected by the public demand for global business to be ethical and environmentally friendly regardless of where they are doing business.
Hardware and software components:
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What hardware will you be using out of the supplied list for this project? Justify your selection.
Our project does not focus on hardware. Since it's a website, it can work on any computer that has a web browser. As far as the phone app is concerned, we will be using a windows 7 based phone. However, we could simulate our code on the windows 7 phone simulation software which is downloadable from the Microsoft website. Thus, there won't be any need of any dedicated hardware components for the development of this project. In case the need arises a team member owns a windows 7 phone, which we can use to test our code once it is complete.
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What additional hardware is desired by your project team? Justify your selection. Make sure that your project can function without these additions as they may not be obtainable.
Since all our hardware requirements are already met and since the software we will be using is freely available, we don't think that we will encounter any issues as far as the availability of hardware or software is concerned.
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What software libraries/toolkits will you be using for this project? Justify your selection.
For designing the website we will either use PHP or JavaScript with CSS whichever we find convenient to use. All the software and toolkits that we will be using are open source and can be downloaded for free. Among these ones are Windows Phone developer tools, Windows Phone 7 Emulator, and Microsoft Expression Blend 4. For the development of the phone app we will need .NET framework, silverlight, and we may or may not use XNA framework.
