Llifelog : discovering and evaluating research projects through peer-to-peer exchange

Abstract

Llifelog is a web platform for discovering, evaluating, and exchanging research projects among students and researchers from both academia and industry. The goal of Llifelog is foster a community of critique among students and researchers in a project market. Those who engage in the market answer the call "find out how your work, projects, and ideas are valued in the community." The unique contribution of the Llifelog system lies in designing market-based mechanisms that stimulate the project exchange while maintaining information confidentiality, and devising a peer-to-peer, direct communication channel between project creators and project viewers. In this thesis, I explain how such market mechanism results more objective evaluation compared to other existing rating mechanisms online. A virtual credit system, Truons, is used in this web platform to facilitate the project evaluation and exchange. The website was built using Java, MySQL, Apache Tomcat, HTML, CSS, and Javascript and hosted on an Ubuntu server. It also uses a Natural Language Processing engine, AlchemyAPI, and various image processing techniques. The platform was tested among about 305 users with 74 projects within 3 weeks. User feedback was also gathered after the testing to further understand the context and rationale for user behavior on the web platform.