Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University

Mentors: Student: Dongge Liu

<p>While retrieving articles with simple boolean queries will suffer from a list of problems in general, several machine learning approaches can be applied to allow better performance in terms of accuracy and efficiency. In particular, instead of naively focusing on the existence of the topic in the article, techniques with machine learning can broaden the search range by including more relevant secondary keywords in addition to the various variation of the given topic. Meanwhile, methods (such as SVM, nearest neighbor) can also be employed to prune the fetched articles to filter out those are irrelevant to our topic despite containing the exact words on the topic. Furthermore, due to the fact that articles may use different choices of words over time, time series analysis needs to be applied to keep track of the evolution of one topic during a certain period of time. In this project, I plan to design and implement a proof of concept unsupervised machine learning approach to retrieve articles and prune the results, with the assistance of mathematical models.</p>

Mentors: Student: krshubham

<p>Going with the idea that is mentioned on Teem’s project idea page, that “Internet applications do not exist as independent islands but rather as a part of a live ecosystem where everything is connected” Just after reading this line I was motivated enough, to make Teem open and connected to multiple popular services running around us. For example Trello, Twitter, Facebook and many others. Also, when I used Teem for the first time, the idea to implement contextual knowledge about integrated links makes sense, since a user coming from most of the web applications today is used to these kind of contextual information. The main target of my project is to let users use Teem with the least friction and make them feel connected across the web.</p>

Mentors: Student: Morgan Gangwere

<p>LibraryBox currently runs on a limited set of TP-Link devices. While relatively simple to get running, LibraryBox still depends on being custom firmware for the TP-Link devices it supports. The goal of this project is to make installation on low-cost wireless hardware such as the Raspberry Pi 3 simple and effective, with a DIY option for those who like mixing up their own dough, while also providing a "bake and run" option for those who'd rather have a pre-made solution.</p>

Mentors: Student: arkokoley

<p>Currently BookANook suffers from a great many UX bugs and seems unpolished in terms of features. With my experience in Web Design and Web Development, I can improve BookANook to be consumer ready product with excellent UX and industry grade production code.</p> <p>The objectives I wish to achieve for BookANook are:</p> <ol> <li>Improve UI and ease of selecting and booking a nook using a Map like interface.</li> <li>Improve the admin dashboard with finer access control over Locations.</li> <li>Build a comprehensive test suite with unit testing, integration testing and end-to-end testing and write deploy/install scripts.</li> </ol> <p>The existing codebase is in Ruby on Rails and jQuery. I would like to port the front-end code to VueJS and utilise the Webpack asset pipeline to manage VueJS and all front-end dependencies. This will help in future-proofing the code against the ageing Rails asset management pipeline as well give access to the testing modules and other plugins from NodeJS ecosystem for building a state-of-the-art front-end. This will also make testing the front-end much easier. I am open to any ideas from the project mentors regarding the design and tooling choices to be made.</p>

Mentors: Student: David Llop

<p>End-to-end encryption (E2EE) has been gaining relevance during the last years due to the increasing privacy concerns of users. Encrypting communications between the client and the server using SSL is not enough to protect users privacy, since data can be read in plaintext in the server, which is not trustworthy.</p> <p>It is trickier to perform E2EE into SwellRT documents than it is to perform it into simple chat messages. SwellRT use operational transformations (OTs) to coordinate the insertion and deletion of characters in its documents, so instead of encrypting the entire document, we need to encrypt each operation and still guarantee that the server has enough information to coordinate the document editioning. Fortunately, it is a field that has been researched for many years and we have some studies that have successfully implemented E2EE in Google Docs. We can take their insights to encrypt SwellRT OTs.</p> <p>The project has two parts. First, we need to encrypt and decrypt successfully SwellRT OTs, using a symmetric key. Then, we need to communicate those symmetric keys among users, and here is where we need public key cryptography.</p>