Initial Idea 1: Helping homeless cats.
In many counties and cities, there are numerous homeless small animals, especially cats. Some of them fled from their own home, some of them are abandoned by owners, and some of them are born in the wild. Every life is worthy of respect. Hence, many people start to choose their own method to save these small lives. Some people would like to feed them of their own accord by providing food and water. Some people catch these cats and send them to local animal shelter hoping others to adopt them. Some people established a non-profit organization to help these small animals. Especially, these zoophilists build catteries at some specific places where homeless cats are spotted by others. And they would regularly put food and water in these catteries.
Currently, building catteries is one of the most effective methods to help these homeless cats. People could just make some houses to provide shelter and put food in them to feed homeless animals. However, there are still some critical disadvantages existed in this way. First, building catteries only depends on non-profit organization could be low efficiency. Second, the expense of food for the non-profit organization could also a serious problem. Third, if some people put food in some catteries voluntarily, others would not know which cattery has already been placed with food or not.
Therefore, I came up with the idea to build a system for these non-profit organizations and people who would like to help these homeless animals. If the organization has built a new cattery where homeless animals are spotted, they would mark this place on the map to tell other people. And if some people build their catteries willingly, they can then inform the local organization. Later, after confirming, this small house will also be marked on the map officially. And people can use this system to check whether this cattery has been put food and water by others or not.
Through this system, a non-profit organization can save much of time and money. Because they can manage these catteries much more easily than before. And people can decide to go which cattery to supplement the food. What’s more, this system could also encourage people to care small lives around them by doing these meaningful activities.
Initial Idea 2: Helping others make choices
In our daily life, we have to make many choices again and again. Some of them are trivial, some of them may influence our life. For example, is this pair of black shoe fit me better for an interview or another brown one? I am going to study at the university this fall as a freshman, which laptop should I buy for my future study?
We are all facing these dilemmas every day. Some of them could not be solved by own ourselves. We definitely need help and suggestions from others, like our parents, friends, neighborhoods, and even some strangers. They could give us useful advice based on their own taste and past experience. According to their recommends, we can make our own decision.
However, these people can’t be around us all the time, especially, the time When we need their suggestions to help us make some important decisions in emergency situations. Hence, I have this idea about building an online system to help people solve this kind of problem. In our online system, the user can upload their problem about making a difficult choice. The user can simply describe their question, provide some images, and give other people a few choices. The other user who sees this problem can vote for the choice that he thinks is right and suitable. Also, the user who voted can also write several sentences to tell why he would choose this instead of others. Then, the user who uploaded this problem could see which choice that most people think is the right answer and why they would do like this.
Intro: I am a second year CS master student.