Recipe Suggestion Tool

There is currently a great need for a tool to search cooking recipes based on ingredients, country and recipe type. Current search engines do not provide this feature. Most of the recipe search results in current websites are not efficiently clustered based on relevance or categories resulting in a user getting lost in the huge search results presented. They also do not provide links to view images of the ingredients of a recipe. My project aims to combine the features like search based on ingredients, suggestions for similar recipes, and images for the ingredients under one search engine and provide an intuitive interface for the same. I explored different clustering algorithms to find an efficient algorithm that can be used to cluster recipe data matching user\u27s queries. As part of this project, I also built FreeText search it help users can search Recipes by ingredients, country and recipe type. I created few charts for users to understand which ingredients are used more in recipes and which country ingredients are more. This website also provides articles to users for making tasty recipes. In this article page users can comment and rate the article. Our website is deployed to Microsoft azure platform

Facebook and Its Users: Using Grounded Theory to Understand Perceived Interactivity as a Constraint in the Rhetorical Situation

The general term interactivity has been used in a variety of disciplines to describe phenomena that occur in website interfaces; however, definitions and explanations about what constitutes interactivity and how it functions do not consider the specific ways in which interactivity can function and be perceived by users in specific rhetorical situations. In this study, I address the problems with the literature about general interactivity in writing studies and in other disciplines such as computer science, advertising, marketing, and communication studies by distinguishing between two types of interactivity—functional and perceived. I situate the different types of interactivity rhetorically, which can enable interface designers to create potential interfaces to be more rhetorically appropriate for end users based on their purposes or reasons for engaging with an interface. In this study, I investigated the ways that perceived interactivity appears as a constraint within the rhetorical situation of the Facebook interface. I also was interested in the ways a user\u27s purpose determines which features of an interface are perceived as interactive. In order to answer my research questions, I used the social networking website Facebook as the site of study. I used grounded theory as a framework to guide my interpretation of the data I collected. I triangulated my data using surveys, case study interviews, and genre analysis to answer my research questions. Grounded theory enabled me to develop theory from the data I collected in order to draw conclusions from my data sets, which I then evaluated further to confirm the results I reported. My results indicate that perceived interactivity functions as a constraint within the rhetorical situation of the Facebook interface enabling users to determine which tasks they can and cannot accomplish through the interface. My research has implications for writing studies—particularly technical/professional communication, rhetoric and composition, and new media. Research that further investigates the ways perceived interactivity functions within specific types of rhetorical situations can enable interface designers to create texts that support users to achieve a variety of purposes for engaging with a website

Full-Text Search Using Elasticsearch

Search engines have changed the way we use the internet. They can search or filter out relevant and valuable content of interest to the users. But many of the applications we use today lack search or are just poor. So how can we leverage the same power of search engines in our applications? This project aims to look at “Full-Text Search” which allows us to do a text-based search in text-intensive data. The search will be performed by matching any, or all words of the query exactly or with some relevancy against the indexes created by the searching tool. The traditional approach to searching is performing a query on the database itself which usually returns the exact match. Searching directly on the database is not desirable because it’s not efficient for full-text search as it involves a large amount of textual data. In this project, I’ve used a search engine tool called Elasticsearch and integrated it with an existing marketplace application that is just a simple website where users would be able to post classified ads to sell their products. I have used Elasticsearch to perform searches on two domains of the application. The first one is the search feature of the website itself. This will be used by the users to search for relevant postings. The second one is the search for the application metrics. This will be used by the administrators. These metrics will contain analytics for the user-posted data, and also infrastructure-related data such as logs, all of which would be generated by performing full-text search and extraction of required data. Also, I’ve used Logstash to ingest data into Elasticsearch from my application, and Kibana for index browsing and data visualization, making use of the whole ELK stack. Elasticsearch is very rich and supports vast use cases. This project looks at the fundamental concepts of Elasticsearch and the features required for my application’s use cases only

Stumbling onto New Ideas: Technical Structure and Interactional Norms on Online Social Media

In its early stages, the Internet was viewed as an open forum for sharing and learning. Now, with a few dominant social media sites mediating most web access and the popular conception of these sites as polarizing filter bubbles, the promise of the open web appears to have been compromised. However, users of the microblogging website Tumblr do not experience this effect, instead encountering new ideas and topics alongside the content with which they intend to engage. Through a survey of over 250 Tumblr users, computational analysis of blogs, and interviews with users, my thesis seeks to uncover why Tumblr has become fertile ground for exposure to new content, expanding users’ information networks rather than reinforcing their preconceptions. I identify the key technical features of the site and social norms that work in combination to create this effect. The technical affordances include Tumblr’s disconnect from users’ offline networks, the site’s less socially focused user experience, reblogs and tags, and the customizability and control given to blog owners. The social understandings that have developed within these affordances include perceived anonymity, low-risk participation, and self-centered blogging. Within the limitations and allowances imposed by these technical constraints and social rules, many users curate personal blogs where they post a diversity of content that reflects their own interests and thoughts. Because of the unsorted nature of the Tumblr dashboard, users that follow personal blogs will encounter all of the content posted on those blogs, and in this way, be exposed to topics and ideas they were not looking for originally

Togather: To gather together

I believe that we can live healthier lives when we address both our mental health and our physical health at the same time, rather than when we focus on only one of them. Currently, however, mental and physical health are treated as separate issues, while actually they are closely connected to each other. In light of this, services and applications that address wellbeing should promote both physical and mental issues in a more integrated way. As a result, I designed a holistic system where what we do for mental and physical health is intertwined. This is the premise for my application TOGATHER, which features an unusual combination of 1) gathering and 2) running. The gathering serves to motivate users to work out and to turn arduous experiences into enjoyable experiences. Running is a medium for getting together with friends, an excuse for keeping in touch, and a way to elevate one’s mood. Through using TOGATHER, users can run with their friends in real-time while talking over the phone though they are not physically together. TOGATHER facilitates appointment arrangements, making it easy for users to overcome distance barriers and go on runs together. In that sense, TOGATHER is a social platform but unlike usual social apps, it is for strengthening existing friend circles and relationships rather than making new connections so that users can take care of themselves and support each other in their comfort zone

Why Do People Adopt, or Reject, Smartphone Password Managers?

People use weak passwords for a variety of reasons, the most prescient of these being memory load and inconvenience. The motivation to choose weak passwords is even more compelling on Smartphones because entering complex passwords is particularly time consuming and arduous on small devices. Many of the memory- and inconvenience-related issues can be ameliorated by using a password manager app. Such an app can generate, remember and automatically supply passwords to websites and other apps on the phone. Given this potential, it is unfortunate that these applications have not enjoyed widespread adoption. We carried out a study to find out why this was so, to investigate factors that impeded or encouraged password manager adoption. We found that a number of factors mediated during all three phases of adoption: searching, deciding and trialling. The study’s findings will help us to market these tools more effectively in order to encourage future adoption of password managers

Investigating design features of a computer-mediated communication system

Computer-mediated communication (CMC) is increasingly used in higher education, but it is not without problems. The effectiveness of CMC depends on many factors, including the characteristics of CMC systems themselves. The research reported here therefore aimed to investigate how an educational CMC system might be improved, in order to support learning more effectively. The main context for the research was distance learning at the UK Open University (OU). A two-stage, mixed methods research approach was adopted. In the first stage, interviews and observations were carried out to explore the benefits and problems experienced by users. This revealed two major issues: information overload and lack of social presence. Information overload relates to users’ problems dealing with large numbers of messages. Social presence relates to the need for users to feel connected with each other. The second stage investigated system features aimed at addressing these issues, implemented in a prototype computer conferencing system. Features to address overload included branched message threading and user recommendations. Features to address social presence were ‘résumés’ and instant messaging. These features were evaluated using questionnaires, with several cohorts of students in an OU course. Students expressed approval of the features, although some features were not widely used. Students preferred branched threading to chronological threading because branching helped them to follow ‘conversations’. Students were uncomfortable recommending messages, feeling that the value of a message would vary between people. They were also uncomfortable using instant messaging to contact others whom they did not know. However, the awareness aspect of instant messaging provided a sense of solidarity. The research demonstrated that the problems of overload and lack of social presence are significant, and each has social aspects which must be addressed. Students’ relationships with each other affect whether and how they use the features of CMC systems. We can conclude that particular attention must be paid to the social aspects of online communication, both when designing educational CMC systems and when considering how they are used. To maximise the benefits for learning, students need to feel comfortable with each other online, and there are few short cuts to achieving this