
Show HN: Crowdsourcing academic profiles for 3,600 computer science professors - lazyjeff
http://drafty.cs.brown.edu/professors/
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p4bl0
So, what's the point? I'm genuinely asking. Is that dataset interesting by
itself or is it the crowdsourcing that is studied? I got this impression from
a message I got when the page finally loaded, just before it crashed with an
out of memory error, it was saying something like "you are free to edit, your
edit actions are recorded".

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lazyjeff
Sorry, was out all day and so was the graduate student working on this. It's
back up and might be more scalable now...

The dataset could be interesting for anyone who wants to analyze it for things
like hiring trends, or for someone who wants to apply to grad school in a
certain topic or faculty positions at a department.

The platform itself is a way to keep dynamic data up to date by asking
visitors for help with fixing data. In some cases, it tries to figure out what
your interests are (universities or research areas you look at most), and ask
you about those.

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tedmiston
The smart up to date part sounds pretty cool. Can you elaborate on how you do
that?

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obscurite
Ended up with a 502 bad gateway. As a part time adjunct, I'm looking forward
to being able to see this.

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jilljennV
Can't even access using good ol' archive.org and Google Cache :D

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DTrejo
Great work @lazyjeff, fellow brown alum here, your other projects* look
awesome too, thanks for sharing :)

* [http://hci.cs.brown.edu/](http://hci.cs.brown.edu/)

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jimhefferon
Works for me (Sun Aug 28 1:52 Eastern US). Looks like a spreadsheet with
names, universities, where they got their PhD, .. , up to photo url.

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andrewl
I got this:

    
    
      Failed to load the widgetset:
      ./VAADIN/widgetsets/drafty.MyAppWidgetset/drafty.MyAppWidgetset.nocache.js?1472407401168

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tedmiston
This is neat. Is the data exploration part something that you've built or off-
the-shelf?

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lazyjeff
We use a java grid library for the table. The part we've built is logging and
computing interests based on user interactions, and then prompting the best
matching items for visitors to fix.

We'll be open sourcing it when we publish the work, so that anyone can load
any updatable data into the platform.

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andrewfromx
man I can't get in either. this looks fascinating though. can someone describe
it?

