Actually

Client

JP Pollak
Email: jpp9@cornell.edu

Technical Contact

Josh Selsky
Email: joshua.selsky@cornell.edu

Background

The Small Data Lab is an interdisciplinary research group led by Professor Deborah Estrin, JP Pollak, and Josh Selsky at Cornell Tech in New York City. The group is exploring new techniques and services for individuals to harness the disparate streams of small data that they generate everyday. The goal is to enable individuals to be at the center of their own personal data universes and to foster a new ecosystem of apps and services that can create insightful, actionable, and, at times, delightful value. By building a number of small data applications and platform tools, the group has begun to identify the common building blocks critical to rapid development of diverse small data applications.

Project Requirements

Actually is an application that tracks the time it takes users to complete real world tasks. A first version of the app will focus on work-related tasks, such as promises to get work done and adherence to deadlines. The app would utilize email and task lists to track commitments and delivery of documents and work and assess how well the user estimated the workload. The app could also access mobile device activity, desktop activity, social activity, browser history, and media consumption to model how much time was spent doing other things during the time frame.

We expect the user-facing portion of Actually to be developed using responsive web design, or at least be fully functional on mobile, but the project team can propose the contemporary web framework or development environment of their choice. The project team will work with the client to determine the range of systems that the product will draw data from, and any connections to APIs or tools built to acquire data streams should be built modularly such that they can be shared among other apps developed by the SDL.

Note

Because the clients are based at the Cornell campus in New York City, most communication with the project team will be remotely. In setting up the project, the team should discuss with the client how this communication will work and include a description in the feasibility study.