Projects

You will be able to choose one of three types of projects, these will have different requirements regarding previous skills, and time commitment. In the past we have had teams with "free riders" who were not carrying their weight, leading to dissatisfaction and demotivation of contributing team members. We therefore encourage you to be upfront, and tell your colleagues how much work you want to invest in your project. The more you do, the more you will learn, but this also takes more time beyond the official requirements. Skills required for the different projects are:

Software development
Statistics
Web design/Information visualization
Community building/Marketing/Product design

Link for Team Signup

Coolhunting projects

Requirements:

Software development (medium),
Statistics (medium),
Web design (medium),
Community building (low),
Level of difficulty (low to intermediate)

Are you a Fatherlander, Nerd, or Treehugger

Our world seems to be split into three alternate realities, with people sharing the same space, but living withing their own social bubbles and echochambers. The goal of this project is to understand who the key influencers are (for a start, what about as Fatherlander: Donald Trump, as Nerd: Elon Musk, as Treehugger: Pope Francis) and what their key topics on social media are. The goal is to create a "translation system" to support the dialog between the three alternate realities.

Project owner: Peter Gloor

Measuring the Innovation Quotient of SwissRe

The idea would be to measure the innovation quotient of Swiss Re by comparing its footprint on social media (Twitter, Blogs, Facebook, Wikipedia, etc), and compare it with competitors and direct insurers.

We would construct different types of social media networks of Swiss Re, Munich Re, Zurich, etc.:

(1) The influencer networks of people working for, with, and around these companies

(2) Extract the key attributes of the companies

(3) compute the company social networks on the firm level

We would get an innovation scoring of the different re-insurers and insurance companies, explained through these three networks.

This would also allow us to identify new uses for emergent technologies such as blockchain, uses of AI to predict risks, new ways of engaging with customers, identify new insurance products, etc.

Project owner: Swiss Re/Peter Gloor

Body hacking and eternal life

Body hackers extend their physical body with technology, implanting themselves with microphones, chips, and computers. Hugh Herr at the Media Lab is a better rock climber now, than before he froze his feet off, as he can now extend his artificia feet with his thoughts. Ray Kurzweil thinks that in 2050 technology will be ready to extend the human life span infinitely.

In this project we will identify latest trends, and do our own prediction of how future cyborgs will look like, and how advances in medicine might make as immortal.

Project owner: Peter Gloor

What are the most highly ranked cities

Using the same methodology as the GDI thought leader project http://www.thoughtleaders.world/en/, this project measure the largest cities of the world by different criteria on social media, such as: most economically powerful, best quality of life, most artistic, etc. While there are many city rankings (just Google it), they are all based on subjective ratings by experts. In this project we analyze them using coolhunting with Condor on social media.

Project owner: Peter Gloor/Karin Frick, GDI

Predicting new global conflicts

Based on an idea by Joel Meiller and Thierry Bitz, develop a system that searches on social media for global hotspots where an armed conflict might be likely.

Methods are for example looking at Wikipedia edit wars, and looking at conflicting word usage in Twitter using Machine Learning.

Project owner: Peter Gloor

The Future of Milk

1. How will the consumer consume milk from 1017 to 2025/30

2. What will be the attitude towards health and healthy food

3. How relevant will current trends about milk be: organic milk, pasture-fed milk, regional milk, C02-footprint, sustainability environmental awareness, packaging, vegan food, high protein foods, welfare of animals,...

4. What is the impact of socio-economic trends such as urbanization, demographic change, digitalization on nutrition and consumer behavior.

5. Impact on branding and introduction of new milk-based products

6. Impact of consumer behavior through regulators and NGOs

7. Impact of new societal trends in Germany, Europe, US, China

sponsor: GDI

VR technologies

which technology and which brand will succeed in future,
what will be used in real world and what not,
what could be additional feature (eg. full body tracking, etc)

Prediction projects

Requirements:

Software development (high),
Statistics (high),
Web design (low),
Community building (low),
Level of difficulty (high)

Building a Happimeter with an Android App and Pebble Smartwatch

Our mind feels and our body senses when we are happy – or unhappy. Knowing when we are happy, and telling others about it will make them and us happier.

Goal: build a body sensing system that measures and visualizes our happiness. It will consist of a Smartwatch or Android (later also iPhone) App that polls us 5-7 times per day to collect our emotional states. At the same time a Pebble smartwatch will collect a variety of body readings (temperature, light, steps, sleep, speech, energy,…).

Research Hypothesis: Comparing Pebble sensor readings with emotional state will allow us to correlate mood state with Pebble readings to automatically calculate mood state from Pebble sensor readings.

This project is based on a pilot that has been developed in the fall 2016/17 COINs seminar

New extension ideas:

1. Build team-level happiness-feedback system: during a meeting, tell me if participants get less happy

2. Build event happiness measurement system. Distribute Pebbles at the beginning of event, do real-time tracking/display of participant satisfaction

3. Build “loneliness tracking system” for old people, telling when they have not been in touch with anybody for some time.

4. Build “umbilical cord” between a social worker and her/his customer. Mothers on welfare have very weak social support structures, with a happimeter they can get a strong link to somebody who cares about them.

5. In a hospital, equip nurses with happimeter, track their stress level/happiness in their bed stations

6. Build “umbilical cord” between a patient of chronic diseases (and their caregivers). Also predict flares of “Crohns.

7. Build burnout detection system for doctors

Project owner: Peter Gloor

Cool Hunting (TV)Series

Series like The Walking Dead, Breaking Bad, House of Cards or Game of Thrones become increasingly popular and can be watched not only in free or pay TV but also on service on demand platforms like Netflix or amazon prime video.

Journalist speak of “The Golden age of TV “ (see Erlichman, J. (2016), „The ‘Golden Age of TV’ Has A Lot of People Worried“, http://fortune.com/2016/01/18/golden-age-tv-peak/) .

But until now, little is known about the phenomenon of theses successful Series.

In this project, we apply social media analysis and identify based on UGC:

What are the people speak about in context of series?
Who is watching Series?
Why are people watching Series?
What are indicators for success?

Project owner/instructor: Vanessa Beule (Beule@wim.uni-koeln.de) & Gloria Volkmann (volkmann@wim.uni-koeln.de)

MusicGalaxies

Music as a product of creative work depends significantly on interaction and collaboration between musicians, composers, producers and lyricists. Certain periods, and genres are considered hotspots of creativity and collaboration, where new musical ideas are shared and movements arise.

In this project, we apply social network analysis, visualize the relationships among popular musicians in different genres, and identify “collaboration patterns“ that might be an indicator for success.

Data sources/resources:

https://musicbrainz.org/doc/MusicBrainz_Database
https://github.com/discogs/discogs_client

Related projects/literature:

Budner & Grahl (2016). Collaboration Networks in the Music Industry. https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.00377, see http://www.album-network.uni-koeln.de/
Bryan & Wang (2011). Musical influence network analysis and rank of sample-based music, 12th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference, pp. 329-334.
McAndrew & Everett (2015). Music as Collective Invention: A Social Network Analysis of Composers, Cultural Sociology 9(1), pp. 56-80.
Yim, Shaw & Bartram (2009). Musician Map: visualizing music collaborations over time, Proceedings of the SPIE.

Project owner/instructor: Matthäus P. Zylka

Community building and Web design project

Requirements:

Software development (medium),
Statistics (low),
Web design (high),
Community building (high)
Level of difficulty (intermediate)

Your own topic

Contact the instructors with your own project ideas before the project phase starts.

The evaluation criteria are

Quality and originality of the final product
For example (Web site, predictions, coolhunting reports, code developed, data collected, etc),
Theoretical insights gained
Practical applicability, (e.g. for a startup based on project results)
Quality of the documentation
Quality of the final paper

COINs15 winter seminar final papers

COINs16 winter seminar final papers

Signup Sheet (deadline April 13, 2017 midnight)

Rules:

at least 2 locations per team,
at most 5 (exceptionally 6) members per team,
preferably at least 2 people per location
enter 1st and 2nd choice

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