Yay!

The shortlist of the ACM Computer Human Interaction Conference (CHI) Student Design Competition has been announced and in the top 12 teams, 5 teams are from our program. Our team made it too ! The next round of the competition would be at the conference in April in San Jose.

The problem was to design a solution to encourage people to use public transit. We took the social networking route, linking transport options to the networking site Facebook, allowing people who plan events on Facebook, to also plan their transportation options. On Facebook, a person's activities are made available for all his friends to see, and when they know that their friend is taking the bus, our argument was that they would be inclined to do so too. Our studies on college students here suggested that people don't take public transit because there is a notion that public transit is for those who can't afford a car or because they didn't like traveling with strangers. Our solution with social networking would allow friends to plan their transport together, thus solving the problem of traveling with strangers, and since everybody is aware of who's traveling by public transport, any wrong notions are removed.