For my senior design project, my team members and I were assigned to add to the work of a graduate student who developed algorithms to recommend Points of Interest (PoI) in a Geographical Information System (GIS). The algorithm takes in the current location of the user, and depending on the intended application, will recommend a set of diverse PoI that is traversable using a relatively short path from the user’s starting location.

Our task as a senior design team is to create an application that can display GIS data and could be used by a potential customer. We are to then use this application, along with a large set of GIS data, to demonstrate the strengths and weaknesses of recommendation algorithms.

From this project, I expect to learn a lot about GIS systems and programming. I also plan to gain more experience with backend work. I will also get to work on a project with a much larger team (my senior design team has 7 students), which should teach me a lot about working in a larger development environment. We plan to split into smaller teams that will operate on their sprint cycles, which will also be educational.

I hope that our work on this project will contribute to the body of knowledge on GIS-based recommendation systems and that we can demonstrate some interesting use cases of these algorithms.