Status Update #1

Team Members
Carla Villoria and Jaideep Balekar

What did you work on this week?

• Formed Team
• Found some resources (information databases) that we will be needing to implement this app.
  
• Designed a sample screenshot of the program

What problems did you run into?
Since almost no one has worked on similar projects before, there are very limited resources available. There are some existing databases, but unfortunately we can not access it and import all the information. We will have to manually perform checks for individual brands and gather the information. This might take up a lot of time and labor.

What is the current overall project status?
The project is currently in the pre-planning stage. We are currently working on gathering the information and resources that we'll need.

What new ideas did you have? These ideas can be beyond the scope of this semester.
Both the phone app and the website would give a recommendation on whether to buy/use a product/service along with a “goodness” score based on our classification algorithm. However, it would also provide information about the company to indicate how our recommendation was derived and to give the user the opportunity to make a more informed decision on his/her own. Also, if our recommendation were a “no buy” because we believe the company is unethical, then we would recommend a similar but ethical product that the consumer could buy. We also discussed having several categories, for example: human rights, the environment, social justice, etc, to make it more specific for each person, as someone might care more about child workers than environmental damage or vice versa. Another thing we could implement is some sort of labels like “made in United States”, “produced locally”, “international headquarters”, etc. 


Look ahead
Plans for next week

• Extend and elaborate the initial proposal and finish the full project proposal.
  
• Continue researching about the resources that we will be needing.
• Research about the technologies and development platform that we will have to use.