Penn-Face Book

Nets212: Scalable and cloud computing, Penn Engineering - Fall 2018

Node.js, HTML, Hadoop MapReduce, Amazon AWS (EC2, DyanamoDB)

Overview

On Penn’s campus, the term “Penn Face” refers to the fact that many students put up a front of success and feeling stress-free even though they may be struggling academically or emotionally. With many students putting up a “Penn Face”, the problem is that each student thinks all the other students are fine and it’s just them who is struggling. The result of Penn Face is that students fail to ask for help when they need it. Our project, PennFace-Book tries to address this problem through the use of a social media service.

For our Scalable and Cloud Computing course, our term project was to design a mini-Facebook application with a specific theme or concept. My group of three chose to tackle PennFace with the social media we built. The concept of PennFace-Book was to allow students to form a network of friends and helpful resources available on Penn’s campus (e.i. Counseling and Psychological Services, Penn Tutoring Center). Students are able to post anonymously to their feed so that friends and associated resources can reach out and offer counsel to anonymous students/peers.

Built using: Node.js, JavaScript, HTML, Hadoop, MapReduce, Amazon AWS (EC2, DyanamoDB), Bootstrap

My Contributions

We all contributed to building the basic functionality of the social media platform. This included working on both front-end and back-end aspects of profile creation, signing in, posting, liking, and commenting. My main individual contributions to this project was a recommendation algorithm based on the adsorption algorithm. I used AWS’s Iterative MapReduce to generate my recommendations.

Features

The features of the project we built include

  • Anonymous posting

  • Commenting and liking on posts

  • Friend recommendations using Iterative MapReduce

  • Chat application with persistent history

  • Secure login (no access to profile/home pages without logging in)