I just want to say how excited I was by the work everyone did for the first assignment (Byte 1). They were all wonderful, and it was so exciting to see you beginning to work with data, but four of the handins really stood out to me and are listed below:
- Adam Durity put together a nice system for searching for photos by both topic and location. This made for some interesting juxtapositions. Hats off as well for nice visual design.
- Harsh Alkutkar's system calculates a sentiment score (positive or negative) based on the results of your search. Text processing is still a ways off in the class, but this approach is relatively straightforward and really shows the power of doing something programmatic (otherwise why not just look at your output inside Yahoo Pipes :).
- Jian Fang's application does a wonderful job of setting up an interesting question -- who has gotten admissions notifications for graduate school? Kudos as well for wonderful visual design (all the way down to a thumbnail icon) and a lovely ajax interface with a 'load more' button.
- Preethi Sureshkumar searches across several types of social media and jumped ahead to Byte 3 when she also created a pie chart showing the relative number of posts matching the search from each source.