Visual Analytics Project

Modified

March 23, 2025

Building Web-enabled Visual Analytics application with Shiny for Democratising Data and Analytics

Overview

The purpose of the project is to provide students first hand experience on building web-enabled visual analytics application by using Shiny. It aims to democratize data and analytics. Hence, the application focuses and emphasises on interactivity and effective integration of techniques from data analytics and data visualization.

A project may involve developing new methods or implementing visual analytics system to support analytic tasks in specific domains. Alternatively, a project may be in the form of application development by integrating analytical tools within a visual analytics environment. Students are encouraged to focus on research topics that are relevant to their field of study. It should address a concrete visual analytics problem and should propose a novel and creative solution.

Project Topic

The followings are possible topic and data sources:

Project Management

The project is team work. Students are required to form a project team of 2-3 members by the first week of the academic term.

A good group project is a system consisting of a collection of well defined sub-modules. Each sub-module should be the responsibility of one person and be clearly identified as their project. A good criteria for whether you should work in a group is whether the system as a whole is greater than the sum of its parts!

Each project team are required to maintain a comprehensive Minutes of Meeting from the beginning of the project until the end of the project. Each minutes of meeting should include but not limit to the discussion, disagreements, and consensus made and action items agreed within the team. The Minutes of Meeting should also record the division of labour and the considerations involved in the decision made.

The following links provided useful guides on how to prepare the minutes of a meeting:

  1. How to Write Meeting Minutes: Examples + Best Practices
  2. How To Write Effective Meeting Minutes(with Templates and Samples)

The Minutes of Meeting must be uploaded on eLearn within 24hrs after the meeting ended.

Project Milestone

  • Brainstorming project ideas and consulting with course instructor anytime after the project topic(s) is released.
  • Editing and publishing project proposal on Netlify latest by the end of Week 8.
  • Uploading project poster on eLearn by 2nd April 2025 at 11:59pm (mid-night).
  • Poster presentation: 5th April 2025 9:30-11:00am, Venue: Alcove, Basement SCIS I
  • Submission of final application, user guide, project poster and artifacts: 6th April 2025 by 11:59pm (mid-night)

Project Deliverables

Project Github

At the beginning of the project, project teams are required to create a project Github. The project Github should include all the materials used to develop the project and the written materials such as proposal, poster and practice research paper. It must be used to maintain a complete project version control including the application and project documents. The Github link must be included in the project proposal. By the end of the project, the project team must pack the final version of the Github repository and upload onto eLearn for final submission. The Github link also must be provided on eLearn.

Project Website

Each project team are required to create the project website by using Quarto. It will be disseminated by using webserver such as Netfity.

As a first step, you should create a project summary at the project website that includes:

  • The title of your project,
  • A short description of not more than 350 word summarising the motivation, objectives, main features of the application your team are going to build, and
  • The project proposal. This should in a webpage (remember to provide a link at the wiki).

Project proposal

Each project teams must start thinking about their project ideas after the Shiny Workshop. They are expected to discuss their project topic and scope of works with the instructor from week 1 onward. A project proposal in the form of website edited using Quarto will be prepared and the link must be provided on eLearn by 9th March 2025.

The project proposal should describe the motivation of the project, problems or issues that the project will address, the relevant related work, the approach the team plans to take to solve the problem, and early prototypes or storyboards. The project teams should take advantage of this proposal as a chance to get feedback on the direction of the project from their peers.

Students are required to update their project websites with all the details including the final application, user guide and poster by 6th April 2025.

Poster

The project poster should provide an overview of your project. It should include, but not limited to the following information:

  • Issues and problems - A clear statement of the issues or/and problems your project addresses.

  • Motivation - An explanation of why the issues and/or problems are interesting and what make them difficult to solve.

  • Approach - A description of the techniques or algorithms you used to solve the problem.

  • Results - Screenshots and a working demo of the system you built.

  • Future Work - An explanation of how the work could be extended.

The dimensions for the poster must conform to the International Standards Organization (ISO) poster size format (A1).

  • Size = ISO A1 (594 × 841mm or 23.39 × 33.11inci)
  • Resolution = 300dpi or above
  • 7016 pixels x 9933 pixels (print resolution)
  • File format = jpeg
  • Name the poster as ISSS608_AY2024-25Jan_Group00.
Note
  • If MS Power Point is used to prepare the poster, please consult this link to change to default configuration in order to ensure that the final jpg file conforms to the requirement stated above.
  • The poster will be considered a final deliverable, so don’t forget to apply good visual design and data visualisation principles and best practice to your poster.

Final Deliverables

The final deliverable will include:

  • Deployment of the Web-enabled Visual Analytics Application on shinyapps.io by RStudio.
  • Artifact including the ShinyApp codes, data and all r modules.
  • User Guide - Step-by-step guide on how to use the data visualisation functions designed.
  • Project poster
  • Minutes of Meeting

The final deliverable must be uploaded into the Dropbox of e-Learn (e.g. LMS). It must in a single zip file format. If the file size is beyond the file size allocated by eLean, it can be upoaded on SMU OneDrive.

Grading

The visual analytics project will account for 30% of your final grade in the course. The distribution of marks for each stage of the project are as follows:

  • Project website 15%
  • Poster 15%
  • Minutes of Meeting 15%
  • Peer Evaluation 15%
  • ShinyApp 40%

The course instructor will consider strongly the novelty of the idea (If it has never been done before, you will get lots of credit!), how it addresses the problem at hand, the methodology you employ in doing the research, and your technical skill in implementing the idea.

Grading criteria for poster

The poster will be graded based on the following criteria:

  • Clear communication of key aspects of solution
  • Clear communication of design approaches
  • Clear communication of arguments for proposed solution
  • Craft quality of the solution

Sample Projects

Note that the following examples are for references purposes. You are urge to use your own creativity and innovation to design the application.

AY2019-2020 January

AY2021-22 January Term

AY2021-22 April Term

AY2022-2023 January Term

AY2022-2023 April Term

AY2023-2024 January Term

AY2023-2024 April Term

Q & A

If you have any question, please post it on Piazza.