November 30, 2004 Project class

The Plan: Keep working on other stuff and also think about cool things to do with graph data.

Over the next few weeks, we'd like to have people take these algorithms and find connections/paths in data and basically implement the standard graph algorithms (or hey, maybe the not-so-standard ones too). Basically, if you find some good graph data, there's probably a relevant algorithms you can use on them.

Random ideas:

• Degrees of Allen Downey
• Obscure Olin connections
• Copublication records
• foaf data (kindof cliquey though, not yet widespread at Olin)

• Word connections -- screenscraping, or there may be an API for WordNet

• Olinbuster
• del.icio.us connections

The goal of the exercise:

• Implement at least one graph algorithm on some piece of data
• Also, some of the things we could come up with could be actual interesting applications that could live on beyond the course.

Over the next two weeks

• Write some graph application
• Summarize what you did over the semester / "Table of Contents" of your project assignments
  • List the programs you wrote
  • List what worked well/not so well
  • Things you learned a lot about / learned not so much about
• Feedback. We're still building the course. Places where topics connected or didn't connect and other such feedback will help us make it better the next time around.
• Presumably everybody in project has made at least one application that could be amenable to placing in your portfolio. If this is true for you, Lynn would love to see your portfolio reflection(please email it to her). If this is *not* true for you, let Lynn know -- we may want to tweak some of the project assignments next time so that they're better suited for portfolios.

If you'd like to demo your graphs project, let Lynn know ahead of our last class.