SmartCalendar

Proposal for TAMU CSCE 670 project 
By Xixu Cai, Yue Zhuo, Lin Mu

What is exactly the function of your tool? That is, what will it do?
    Our tool is going to help Texas A&M students find on-campus events more easily.  For example, if you want to watch a free movie this weekend on campus, you should take a look at our SmartCalendar because our tool save you a lot of time looking through your emails for the right event.  We also put the events on calendar; so you won’t forget it!  Our tool first extract event information from your email box.  Then it will parse out time, place and the actual activities of the event.  According to the activities, SmartCalendar will categorize the events into “movies”, “live shows”, “food”, “seminar”, etc.  Then our SmartCalendar will output a calendar with all the events which has been categorized by different colors.  You can easily identify the time, place, and activity in the SmartCalendar. Hooray! 

Why would we need such a tool and who would you expect to use it and benefit from it?
    Texas A&M provides a lot of activities for students, such as free movies, free food, free seminars, free comedy shows, etc.  We can join the mail-lists of different departments or organizations such as the Grad Student Council, the Visual Effects and Arts, the Rec Center, the Computer Science Graduate Student Organization and so on.  It takes a lot of time to go through all these emails every day and try to figure out events that are interesting.  The SmartCalendar will save you a lot of time by putting all the event information on one calendar and color-coding the activities.  Most Texas A&M students will benefit from our tool who want to find the right on-campus events for themselves. Our tool will also benefit groups and organizations to broadcast their events.  It’s a win-win tool!   

Does this kind of tools already exist? If similar tools exist, how is your tool different from them? Would people care about the difference? How hard is it to build such a tool? What is the challenge?
    Food-bot, a website created by students from Carnegie Mellon University,  returns all free food information on several university campuses (Yale, UT Austin, etc.) from the emails the website administrators received.  
    Our SmartCalendar does not only returns “free food” information, but also looks for other activities such as academical seminar, movies, lives shows and so on.  Our calendar is color coded to save users’ time scanning their interested activities. 
   People would surly care about the difference since our tool does not only present free food information, but also a lot of more interesting activities. 
    There are several challenges in our project. First challenge is email classification. We need to find the suitable method to correctly label the emails to an activity class, like food, movie, seminar, etc. After classification, the next challenge is to strip out all necessary data, including time, place and description of the event. It is difficult to assume which way people choose to communicate an event information in the email. We need to find a way to recognize when and where the event takes place.
 
How do you plan to build it? You should mention the data you will use and the core algorithm that you will implement.
    We plan to create a gmail account and subscribed to a number of mailing lists on campus. Then we will get our event data from these mailing lists everyday, which we use some classification algorithm to classify into different categories and extract their event information, e.g. date, time and location. 
 
What existing resources can you use?
    There are some useful tools. Weka provides several classification techniques, from which we could choose a best method for our problem. To process natural language, we may use NLTK, a leading platform for building Python programs to work with human language data. 
 
How will you demonstrate the usefulness of your tool?
    Our tool provides useful information to students every day. We will create a gmail account, subscribe to mailing list on TAMUDirectMailingLists, and then use our tool to analyze the emails and generate a calendar on some day. At the same time, we manually find the correct calendar. Then we can evaluate the performance of our tool by comparing these two calendars.  If our tool is proved to be correct, we can distribute our tool to Texas A&M students and receive feedbacks from them.  Hopefully, our tool will help college students’ life become easier. 
 

 




note: http://calendar.tamu.edu provides a lot of useful information on campus. It can be an external evaluation source.