Beta Review and The Last Three Weeks

I met with Norm and Joe for my Beta Review on Monday. I think that things went much better than the Alpha Review, and I am much happier with my progress. Somethings that Norm and Joe said that would like to see was better ease of use. Norm though it would be good improve the food search functionality and improve the results possibly using something similar to page rank and maybe caching results. It would also be good to improve the ordering of the nutrient listings to better reflect what users want.

My goals for the remainder of the semester are as follows:

Next Week (12/5 - 15/11)

• Add Data information to meals
• Add in number of servings for each meal
• Normalize nutritional information using daily recommended values
• Research Page-Rank Techniques, I found two papers that seem useful.
• http://www.cs.toronto.edu/vldb04/protected/eProceedings/contents/pdf/RS22P3.PDF
• http://www.cidrdb.org/cidr2003/program/p9.pdf

Reading Week (12/12 - 12/18)

• Speed up food search using some kind of ranking algorithmic
• If the techniques described in the above two articles are impractical given time constraints, I will fall back to just sorting by the percentage of the word the search string matches.
• Sort nutrient information based on what is most important

Finals Week (12/19 - 12/21)

• If search needs refinement, I will spend the rest on my time refining the algorithm
• If search is well done, I will instead work on adding another, feature perhaps specifying a personal diet goal, or adding in a preview view before permanently adding in a food item.