Design Project - CS473 Social Computing / 2025 Fall

What do we do?

This is a team-based, semester-long design project, in which you'll create an original social computing application on your own. You'll work in teams of three to four people. More information about each milestone will be added to this page. Here is the timeline and grading weights for each milestone:

Please note that all team members will receive the same grade for all the milestones.

Why do this?

Now that you've mastered the arts and skills of social computing, it's important that you apply what you learned to a problem you deeply care about. It's a great way to learn further, and potentially make impact.

Does my project idea qualify?

Projects are open-ended, so please be creative. But here are some requirements:

Your project should involve a VOLUNTARY OR INTRINSICALLY MOTIVATED USERS, which means you cannot use paid crowds (e.g., MTurk, Upwork).
Your project should have some user interface. I'm expecting most projects to be a novel crowdsourcing and social computing system that can be tested by others (e.g., a prototype website or a mobile app). Data mining or analysis focused projects are okay, but there needs to be some visualization or analytics dashboard component that is accessible by others to understand your results.
Your prototype doesn't need to be a fully implemented platform, menaing that it needs to focus on the core crowdsourcing / social computing concept you're introducing, rather than to build all the database backend, login, etc.
Connecting to your own research (if applicable) is encouraged, but please make sure to talk to course staff early about how to make it happen.

Can I use AI/coding support tools?

Yes, for this project you are allowed to use AI-based tools to support your development. However, you must document which tools you used and what you used them for! Please remember that you are ultimately responsible for the code you submit, so you should be carefully checking the output of any AI-based tools.

Examples

Here are the project gallery pages from the previous years:

How do we submit?

We'll create a submission link for each milestone, which you can find on the milestone webpage.

Late Policy

For each milestone deadline, all members of your team will lose 10% for each late day. Submissions will be accepted until three days after the deadline. After then you'll get 0 on that assignment. Please note that late submissions for final presentations are not allowed.