Noah Sang-Jin Pietrafesa

I am a 21 year old IM Student studying at NYUAD. I am a mixed Korean and Italian from New York, USA. I like music, art, games, coding, and data science.

The “Unproject”

This assignment was worked on with Yernar Mukayev.

Introduction:

Many people commonly mark the places they have visited or moved to, either for future reminiscence or as part of a collection. After thoughtful consideration, we decided to embark on a project that can be implemented in the short term, utilizing the skills and knowledge we acquired in this class. We aimed for our project to be realistically feasible rather than overly ambitious, with the potential to grow tremendously and become a valuable asset for future generations

Our Idea:

We decided to create a “Future Humanity Visual Path Guide”. It serves as a cutting-edge web platform where users globally can mark and share the places they have visited. This interactive map creates a living, user-generated database, offering unique insights into travel patterns and cultural hotspots.

Key features include:

  1. Interactive Global Map: Users pin locations they’ve visited, contributing to a collective world map.

  2. Cultural Trend Analysis: The app analyzes travel data to identify cultural and travel trends across different regions and nationalities.

  3. Personalized Travel Logs: Users can create and share their travel stories, enhancing the communal experience.

  4. Data Visualization: Sophisticated tools present data in engaging, easy-to-understand visual formats.

Inspiration:

When we worked on visualizing, we had a chance to work with old corpora that included travel blogs. This prompted us to ask ourselves, what could be the modern-day equivalent of these travel vlogs for our generation? After attending a workshop this semester, we discovered Nodegoat, which inspired us with its dynamic visualizations. We aim to make our project more accessible and user-friendly. In summary, we aspire to create a vast database collection tracking people’s movements around the globe.

Importance of This Project:

  1. Analyze cultural and country-based movement trends.
  2. Analyze other trends, such as time and seasonal movement patterns.
  3. It can be a future database that can be utilized for research purposes
  4. It can act as a viable alternative to the manual approach of marking locations on a physical map.
  5. In the future, it could become an incredible platform for travel-related social media.

Work Plan:

  1. Interview travel bloggers to understand what users would want on our platform.
  2. Test how visualization will work with tools like Kepler and Nodegoat.
  3. Create our own visualization map from scratch.
  4. Work on promoting the app to users all over the world.
  5. Analyze user input travel data and analyze cultural trends.

User Attraction

Our web-software tool will be an amazing resource for people to track their travel trips and will also allow them to share their journeys with friends. Therefore, we plan to incorporate a social media development model to attract users. I believe users will find it interesting to share their trips with community groups they can create. These groups could be categorized as ‘friends’, ‘family’, ‘general’, and similar divisions. Because data privacy is important, users will have to consent before their data can be analyzed. People can use it simply as a platform for sharing their trips.

Additional Improvements:

  1. We want to create a machine learning model that can recommend people places based on where their friends have traveled or where people in their country like to travel to. We would use the data collected from our platform to model this.
  2. Because we believe the data research is important, we want to create an API that would make it easier for researchers to use our database.

Appendix

Presentation link:

Link to Google Slides Presentation