This week, I mostly focused on the ethics side of the project. This involved participating in a very interesting discussion between many groups about the ethics in both our projects and others, and we got some very interesting feedback that I considered and thought of solutions for. Specifically, two main points of concern were addressed:
- Anybody can access the data through the web app, and this data can be used for many purposes besides finding a free seat in the UC. To address this, we are going to restrict web app access to those with Andrew logins. While this may restrict access to a minority of the use case members, as some Chartwells employees use the tables as well and the UC is technically open to all people on the weekdays, we believe that this is a necessary step to secure the safety of the data of the remaining users.
- If this system is set up in the UC, people do not have the option of not having their occupancy tracked or opting out. Although this is definitely of concern, there are cameras in the UC that can be used to track someone’s location. More importantly, though, we would intentionally spread flyers notifying people of the way the hardware works and that no personally-identifiable data is being gathered as we advertise the app. We believe that the vast majority of the users, once informed, would not have concerns with the system; conversely, there is no easy solution to implement for the edge case of users that still do have concerns.
Unfortunately, since the rest of the hardware arrived very late in the week and due to some personal issues, I was not able to put forth much work on the project design this week, which has pushed me a bit back on schedule. Since I have a lighter schedule this upcoming week, I am hoping to be able to make up for the lost time. This week, I plan to assemble all of the hardware together, and I intend to at least get started on writing code to initialize all systems and get the sensors talking to the processor, in preparation for the interim demo coming up.