Ideas
From GSLISWiki
This is a page to share ideas for projects, discuss interesting research ideas, talk about ideas for how to use this wiki, etc. Don't post anything here you hope to get published. Here are some of the ideas that have been floating around.
Contents |
[edit] Ideas People are Actively Working On
- Yellow Arrows - You can buy Yellow Arrows off the web that have a number you can text message. These can then be posted in physical locations or worn, and used to leave vitual graffiti, as anybody who text messages the number can see a history of messages which were left.
- Cameron and Dan are developing an assassin's game that uses these yellow arrows. If you are interested, get in touch with them.
- Creative Uses for Wikis
- Gina has been working on creative uses of wikis. She currently is doing something with the Music Information Retrieval project using wikis.
- Ingbert is doing a project which will attempt to redesign the IRB Human Subjects application process, using methods like Participatory Design, Scenario Based Design, Affordance Analysis, and others developed by Computer Scientists, in an attempt to see how well they can be applied to design of Institutional Structures and Infrastructure. He is looking for people who are willing to let him watch them fill out the form, or let him interview them. If you are interested, take a look at Ingbert's Research Interests.
- WASABE - A project by Cameron & Ingbert that was put on the back burner for the last two weeks of the semester, it is a prototype of combining a library OPAC with an Encyclopaedia; we used Amazon and a google search of Wikipedia. The goal was to run a search that could also give you some information on the topic you were searching about, and what's interesting, is that the search results actually do it: on a very basic level, it works. Check it out:
http://www3.isrl.uiuc.edu/~mjones2/wasabe/
(The ISRL is up again, so the link should be working again.)
- Wayward is interested in using rewriting logic to support information retrieval (both text and multimedia). She's currently reviewing some literature and bugging some faculty members about this, so hopefully that counts as "Actively Working On" the project.
- Other ideas anyone?
[edit] Ideas Thrown Out for Discussion
Feel free to add ideas, discuss ideas, etc.
[edit] Communication Ideas
- A switch on my laptop/cell phone/PDA/whatnot that can be flipped from "at work" to "at leisure" to "both" to "asleep". Maybe a dial or something. When "at work" notifications of personal emails, personal IMs, phone calls, etc. will be blocked, vice versa for "at leasure", all notifications received when "both", and none when "asleep". Obviously there would be some communications (family members?) which would always be received.
- An interesting idea from Ben Gross's Thesis Proposal Defence, since people use multiple mail accounts to manage their lives, usually with one for work, one for school, one for personal life: What if several versions of Thunderbird were developed, one designed for people to use with their work email accounts, one for their personal email accounts. I'm betting, though I don't know, that different functionality or a different interface would be required to optimize the experience for each type of email.
[edit] Electronic Diagnostic and Medical Records Central Database Tool.
There were two distinct ideas which merged together to form this idea. The first idea basically boils down to an electronic diagnostic tool to help physicians diagnose illnesses by giving them a percentage likelyhood of any particular diagnosis based (1) on other diagnoses made with the exact symptoms, similar symptoms, etc. and (2) on the classical medical diagnostic literature. The second idea is a central electronic database which contains the complete medical records of any single patient, available electronically for easy reference by physicians and hospitals, yet which still allows the patient to maintain his privacy. See: http://www.inquiry.uiuc.edu/ilabs/out.php?cilid=610
[edit] Computer Game Ideas
At MIT they have been developing some educational games along with the Boston Museum of Science. However, these games are designed for the school environment. Is anybody developing recreational games that are also educational, that force you to learn about the real world or about formal systems in order to advance the plot? The point of these games is to combine learning with computer game addiction, so that playing these games will effectively supplement the instruction given at school, both for kids and adults. The closest thing I know of is Sim City and several of Sid Meier's games (like Civilizations). However, there is great untapped potential:
- Develop a computer game whose plotline necessitates the learning of the formal rules of logic and gives the player the experience to apply them successfully.
- Develop a computer game which presents unsolved scientific or mathematical problems as riddles, which need to be solved in order to accomplish certain goals. It seems this would need to be a Massively Multiplayer Online game of some sort, since the answer could not be built into the code. The game could be setup so that it teaches the players all the background information that is thought to be needed to solve the riddle.
- Since the real world is fascinating, and few people know much about it, create a game that takes place in the real world and teaches you about it, but for adults, or young adults, not simple nature games for kids.
[edit] Peer to Peer Cataloging Tool
What if we were to give the functionality of OCLC to a P2P cataloging network? More on this later.
[edit] Community Network Visualization
The local wireless networking initiative (http://www.cuwireless.net) is creating a mesh network based on technology from MIT's Rooftop networking project. At this point, the visualization software for community wireless networks has been "roll your own." What about combining open-source GIS tools, freely available GIS data, and network management software to create a visual map of the network with information about the physical location of the nodes and the conditions in the network (e.g., interference, nodes up/down)?
[edit] PDAs and Disabilities
What about using PDAs to support people with disabilities? Joanna McGrenere at UBC has been working on using PDAs to help users with aphasia (see http://www.cs.ubc.ca/projects/Aphasia/index.html) and it seemed like PDAs might have even more potential. Benetech has been developing a ReadingCam (see http://www.benetech.org/projects/readingcam.shtml) to help visually impaired individuals access text. Wayward looked into using PDAs to "read" text out loud, and ran into a couple of obstacles. First, the PDAs don't usually seem to have very good cameras, and second, it was hard to find good free-open source software that could do a good job recognizing images. (Benetech is using proprietary tools from SRI that are unlikely to be free or even cheap.) However, Carnegie-Mellon has apparently released some pretty good text-to-speech software.
[edit] Other Cool Ideas People Have Come Accross
[edit] Book Crossing
The "3 Rs" of BookCrossing...
- Read a good book (you already know how to do that)
- Register it at the Book Crossing website ( http://bookcrossing.org/ ) (along with your journal comments), get a unique BCID (BookCrossing ID number), and label the book
- Release it for someone else to read (give it to a friend, leave it on a park bench, donate it to charity, "forget" it in a coffee shop, etc.), and get notified by email each time someone comes here and records journal entries for that book. And if you make Release Notes on the book, others can Go Hunting for it and try to find it!
