CS6502: Once upon a Time at UL (before lockdown), There used to be a big traffic jam in the Afternoon on Campus in the first 5 – 6 weeks of each Semester,: Applied Big Data And Visualization Assignment, UOL

CS6502: Project Spec for BA cohort

Project spec

Once upon a time at UL (before lockdown), there used to be a big traffic jam in the afternoon on campus in the first 5 – 6 weeks of each semester, mostly Monday to Thursday. Cars were queuing from Thomond bridge from the northern bank to the flagpole at the main entrance, which is just a nightmare if you want to leave the campus.

There were many discussions on how to resolve/or ease the issue: the lecturer has done some preliminary research in the previous years to check if part of the cause of the traffic jam is caused by the timetable, e.g., if there were many groups of students finishing classes in the afternoon at 4pm and trying to leave campus, then surely the traffic will converge and lead to the long queue.

In this project, you will be given a list of tasks related to the above case the study, for each of the task you will need to:

• design a query to gather the information
• based on the visualization concept from the reading list in week 11’s Sulis

page, choose the right chart type to visualize the data. (Note that you can use any tools you want, Excel, Google Data studio, gnuplot, Matplotlib, etc.)

Note that the data file is available in Sulis site (within Assignment instruction)

Tasks

In the following tasks we want to understand how are the classes being scheduled among each group of the students (students are grouped per course and year,

e..g., students doing Master in Software Engineering is one group of students, and 4th year students doing Computer Systems is another group of students). Note that you may assume the class size for each course is the same.

1. Find out total number of lecture sessions, tutorial sessions and lab sessions throughout the semester.

2. For each teaching week, find out total number of sessions that occurred in Monday morning (before 10am) and Friday afternoon (after 2pm), and the total of sessions in that week.

3. Find out the daily course distribution for the third week (week 3). To be more specific, you should count how many groups of students are having classes on Monday, Tuesday, and so on.

4. For week 3, find out the busiest time period on campus (based on the number of groups that have classes within that period)

5. For week 3, find out the busiest class room (based on the number of groups that have classes in that room)

6. Find out the group hourly course distribution for each day of the third week (week 3). Note that the time interval is per hour, if for a given group there is a class module spread over more than 1 hour (say 11:00 – 13:00), you will need to count the group in both of the two time intervals(11:00 -12:00, 12:00 – 13:00).

7. In question 2, for each time interval, you count any group of students that are having class during the interval. Now in this question, for each of the intervals, you count a group of the students only if the class during it is the last class they are having for that day.

8. For each day in week 3, find out the number of groups that are finishing their final classes of the day at 2pm, 3pm, 4pm, 5pm and 6pm. (e.g., for a given day, there were 40 groups finishing their final classes at 2pm, 30 at 3pm, 45 at 4pm, 23 at 5pm, etc)

9. For week 3, find out how many group of students were having classes on both Monday and Friday.

10. Your own query: come up with a query that can help in understanding the traffic jam issue. For this query, please briefly elaborate the rationale.