Week 2 Overview

Friday June 3, 20016

       Project Background


This week was pretty exciting because we began working on our specific projects. Just to reiterate, I am working with Patrick Shih, Fernando Maestre and Grace Bastin on the Rare Diseases Facebook Extension. This project aims to develop a supportive community for individuals who suffer from a rare disease. Using Facebook for Developers, we will create an algorithm which will facilitate in matching users with other users based on user profiles and group post patterns.

       Permission First


Before we are able to move forward with our application, we must ask Facebook for permissions to collect personal and group data using Facebook Graph API.

Example of Permissions:

CapturePermissions

       Monday and Tuesday


The beginning of my week consisted of researching different papers that could serve as references for our permission justifications. Although this was at first a tedious task, since there are about 40 or more permissions, references for some of these justifications were later used for our related work.

Below is an example of a Facebook Graph API permission and its justification:

User_location is necessary so that we may match users more accurately by their demographics. Also by having access to their location, we will be able to look further into how demographics impact the support users may have with each other, for example will they make their own efforts to meet in person. In the book “Distributed Work: What Do We Know about Proximity and Distance in Work Groups? A Legacy of Research”  written by Sara Kiesler and Jonathon N. Cummings they state that “a large body of evidence suggests that close proximity is beneficial to relationships and group interaction (Kiesler, 57).” They suggest that it is necessary to have demographics due to how proximity may promote more interaction and hence can produce a more beneficial support group for our application.

Kiesler, Sara, and Jonathon N. Cummings. “What do we know about proximity and distance in work groups? A legacy of research.” Distributed work 1 (2002): 57-80.

       Wednesday and Thursday


Since I began by reading a number of papers related to Facebook communities and online social matching, I felt fairly comfortable when it came time to research more relevant related work for our outline. Based off of the recommended researchers given by Professor Shih, I predominantly used Google Scholar to find papers we could use for our related work.

The best part when it came to finding related work was Finding papers that directly supported what we are trying to do in our study. Also, I found that there are a lot of new papers written that deal with the type of research we are trying to conduct.  This was great BUT this made it a little difficult to create a citation tree.

There was a specific paper I wanted to branch off of on the citation tree but could not because it was just published last month [May 2016] and had not yet been cited by other papers.  Since the paper had so much relevant information for our study, I found a way to still include the paper by not making it the starting reference. 

PDF of outline : FINALOUTLINE

Sorry in advance for the tiny figure, I tried to make it more visible without distorting the image:

Vanessa's Citation Tree

My Citation Tree

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       Friday Decorate Desk


So during the week I was pretty busy and had other responsibilities on my mind that I kept forgetting to customize my work space. So since I got things all done and organized by Thursday, as a treat I made it a goal to decorate my desk area Friday.  I didn’t go out to buy anything I just accumulated things I already owned that I knew I could use at my work space the most.

Here is what I came up with:)

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