Week four.

We were supposed to have a meeting with Dr. Jeniffer Mankoff from Carnigie Mellon University on monday at 8 am but it got cancelled due to some reasons. i accomplished the following task this week :

i) Collected data from Yelp and Google.

We are still collecting doctor reviews from health rating sites. So far, I finished collecting from Yelp and Google. On our last meeting Dr. Siek suggested us to collect few more information in addition to what we have collected.

ii) Started writing abstract for the research paper.

iii) Weekly meeting with Dr. Siek and Dr. Jen.

Even though our Monday’s meeting was cancelled, it was later re-scheduled for Wednesday. The meeting started one hour later than the actual time. On that period Dr. Siek gave me various suggestions regarding the improvement of my research paper and she also pointed out the place that I should improve on my research. We had discussions on what we have completed so far and what we have yet to accomplish. The meeting with Dr. Jen started at 9 and we talked about our accomplishments so far. She gave us some suggestions regarding the work we have completed so far. We talked about which additional sites we will be using for review collection and among them which site had  a better coverage. We were assigned with some tasks for the remaining week which included importing articles from shared folder to mendeley and making a codebook.

iv) Wrote a script for Google API.

Lindsay from CMU had sent me the script for Yelp api earlier and i had only collected reviews from Yelp. So I wrote a script to collect information from Google using its API. I finished writing it in around one hour but, it took me a lot of time to fix the bugs that I encountered. Different reviews of a physician were supposed to be printed but, due to this one bug same review was printed multiple times in a csv file. It took me few hours to find and fix it. But, at last the code worked perfectly.

v) Worked on improving paper.

vi) Viewed Yelp’s academic dataset.

We need to collect as many reviews as we can and from the reviews we need a complete comment of the reviewers. But,  Yelp’s API only provides three reviews per business. Apart from that it would provide only 160 character of comments of the reviewers. so, we had to look for a way to get more reviews and full comments. Dr. Siek suggested us to view Yelp academic dataset to figure out if there is any way to get more reviews.

I looked at the data set and it does provide all reviews and complete comment of the reviewer but, most of the information related to reviewer and businesses are encrypted so, I think this approach will be little hard. I will discuss this with Dr. Siek in our next meeting.

We were invited to Dr. Siek’s house on Saturday for dinner. We had a great time there with all the research mentors, REU team and her family members. As a whole this week was fun.