IS3240 Advanced Business Programming in Python - Project: Web Application
IS3240-Project
September 1, 2023
Group Project
1 Introduction
We are in the digital age where technology have been pervasive in both our daily life and work. The pandemic has further accelerated the technological advances in order to adapt past business models into the new era. For example, the nascent platform economy emerged in the past few years has been growing steadily. The rise of digital platforms has enabled more convenient connections for people spanning different geographical boundaries, which, in turn, facilitates both economic and social exchanges.
Meanwhile, the fast-growing blockchain technology is revoluntionalizing the business world by the introduction of its philosophy of decentralization. Notably, whereas the aforementioned platform economy enables individuals to more conveniently do businesses with others, it inevitably results in trust issues as well as power inequality. Blockchain has been seen promising in disrupting the current power distribution by making participants in business networks to have equivalent privilges, mitigating our dependence on third-party institutions.
One can go on and on to enumerate various emerging technology that change our lives. Along with this trend, it is critical to see the growing importance of extracting valuable signals from the massive amount of data using business intelligence techniques. Therefore, this project asks you to exercise the knowledge that you learn from course materials (or supplementary resources) to extract valueable information from the Web, and, more importantly, make a product in the form of a web app with them.
2 Project Requirement 2.1 Topic Selection
There is no constraint on what topic you may to discuss. Nonetheless, to give you a sense of what is expected, here are a few examples:
1
-
Investigate what features are the most important ones for financial institutes to accurately explain credit risks (Possible dataset).
-
The landscape of innovations using patent data (what’s trending). There are many open data on patents if you search on Google (e.g., Hong Kong IPD and USPTO)
If you have an idea but you’re not sure whether it is appropriate (e.g., too ambitious or too limited), please do not hesitate to contact the instructor for discussions.
2.2 Requirement
Your final project will be in the format of a web application. The web application should have the following function:
• Must-haves: Account management:
-
– Letting people to register a new account. The backend server should store the user-
name/password to a database.
-
– Letting people login with their username and password.
-
– Letting people to update their password.
-
– Letting people to destroy their accounts.
Key functions are where you get creative. Two examples are given below (you can make it more interesting; use your imagination!):
1. Stock market analysis:
-
Users can extract stock price data either from APIs (a quick Google search gives me this free API option: https://finnhub.io/) or uploading a CSV files with a designated format (so that you know how to parse it).
-
Users can ask the web app to show a figure of the stock price using scatter plots, line charts, etc. They may also ask you to present one with error bars (depending on how prices would be aggregated over time.)
-
Users can ask the web app to compare the stock price with a certain number. You may want to use SciPy to conduct hypothesis testing.
-
Users can ask the web app to email the results to their email addresses that they use to sign up.
2. Credit Risk Analysis:
-
Users can input a series of credit risk data (in the form of Excel or CSV files). You can design a database table (or multiple tables) to store such data.
-
Users can ask the web app to show various visualizations to display the relationship between various variables(such as gender/age/salary/work experiences) and credit risk (default or not).
-
Users can ask the web app to conduct formal statistical tests to show the relationship
-
Users can ask the web app to email the results to their email addresses (or any given email addresses) that they use to sign up.
-
2
• Users can ask the web app to destroy the data for privacy preservation.
A lot more can be explored here such as connnecting to blockchain networks to show the status or check transactions, etc. It’d be exciting!
2.3 Team formation (By Week 2 Sunday)
You are expected for look for or build a team by yourself. To do this, please actively talk to your classmates and find those with similar interests and ideally complementary skillsets for better task allocation.
Each team should have a size between 4 and 6. The deadline for team formation is the Sunday of Week 2. When you form a team, you will need to list your team members on a designated spreadsheet. For those who fail to find a team by the deadline, the instructor will assign you into teams randomly.
After team formation, please try to settle a tentative topic so that you could start early on the project.
3 Submission
3.1 Submission Materials
You are required to submit the following items in a single Zip file (named as IS3240_teamname.zip):
• Code/App:
-
All your codes (Python and HTML/CSS source codes). These do not have to be in Jupyter notebooks. You may submit your Python scripts directly.
-
A video (you can use Zoom to capture the screen and record it) showcasing how your Web app works.
• Data:
-
Both raw and processed data should be submitted
-
You also need to include a README file to briefly describe where and how you col- lected (e.g., data source, any use of APIs or not, etc.) and how you cleaned the data (column/row removals, new columns based on the raw data, etc.) This README file can be written in any text editor apps (e.g., Word, Page, Jupyter, or any plain text editors such as Notepad or TextEdit).
• Demo:
-
Your presentation is in the form of a live demonstration of your app.
-
You do not have to use slides. It is optional. You can directly go with your app. If you have slides or other supplementary files to facilitate your demo, please submit them as well.
-
Bottom line: make your demo like your poduct release event! 3
• Peer evaluation form: Optional. Find more details below. Important note:
• •
3.2
There will be penalties if your code cannot be run or your results cannot be reproduced with your code and data.
No written report is required.
Peer Evaluation and Free Riders
This is a group project. Unlike homework assignments, you must collaborate with your teammates and contribute to the project. Everyone is expected to contribute (roughly) equivalently. To achieve this, you are suggested to come up with a proper plan in which each teammate is assigned with a task. After all, coordination and collaboration are also important people skills beside techinical expertise such as programming capabilities.
If there is significantly uneven contributions among the teammates, you may submit a peer evalu- ation form to explain the situation with evidence. Following department convention, note that:
-
You do not need to submit such a form if you agree that everyone has done their part.
-
For a team of 𝑁 members, an ideal contribution for each one is 100%. For example, for a
team of 5, a perfect case would be 20% for each one.
-
Extra efforts will Not be rewarded.
• Significant low efforts will be penalized. A significant low effort threshold is defined to be 80 % (inclusive)
To further make this easier to understand, the policy is explained in the following examples:
• A team with 5 members, with members’ contribution being {20%, 22%, 18%, 18%, 22%}. Then this team is considered to have fair contribution equality. Thus no one will be penalized.
𝑁
• A team with 4 members, with members’ contribution being {25%, 15%, 35%, 25%}. Then the second member with only 15% is below the threshold of 80% = 20%. Hence this member’s
25−15 4
score will be 25 % = 40% off the project score received by the team. For instance, if the
𝑁
team receives a project score of 18, then s/he will only receive a score of 18×(1−40%) = 10.8.
3.3 Submission Deadline
-
Slides: Week 11 Sunday 11:59pm
-
Code and Data: Week 13 Sunday 11:59pm
-
Peer evaluation form: Week 13 Sunday 11:59pm
4 Presentation
• There is no strict rule on what tools you should use to make your slides. You can directly go with your app.
-
Each team should present at most 6 minutes. A 20% penalty will be applied for every 1 minute overtime in your presentation score (see below, which takes 10% of your overall project grade).
-
There’s no rule on how many members should present. It could be one or all. However, all members must be present unless you have valid reason to be absent. Every one absent member results in a 10% penalty in your overall project grade.
