Visual Analytics Project

Published

April 7, 2025

Modified

June 15, 2025

Building Web-enabled Visual Analytics application with Shiny for Democratising Data and Analytics

Overview

The purpose of the project is to provide students first hand experience on building web-enabled visual analytics application by using Shiny. It aims to democratize data and analytics. Hence, the application focuses and emphasises on interactivity and effective integration of techniques from data analytics and data visualization.

A project may involve developing new methods or implementing visual analytics system to support analytic tasks in specific domains. Alternatively, a project may be in the form of application development by integrating analytical tools within a visual analytics environment. Students are encouraged to focus on research topics that are relevant to their field of study. It should address a concrete visual analytics problem and should propose a novel and creative solution.

Project Topic

This term the topic of Visual Analytics Project will be based on either VAST Challenge 2025. There are three Mini Challenges (MC). Teams are required to choose one of the MC and build a Shiny Application to answer the questions of the challenge.

Project Management

The project is team work. Students are required to form a project team of 2-3 members by the first week of the academic term.

A good group project is a system consisting of a collection of well defined sub-modules. Each sub-module should be the responsibility of one person and be clearly identified as their project. A good criteria for whether you should work in a group is whether the system as a whole is greater than the sum of its parts!

Project Milestone

  • Brainstorming project ideas and consulting with course instructor anytime after the project topic(s) is released.
  • Editing and publishing project proposal on Netlify latest by the end of 8th June 2025 at 11:59pm (mid-night).
  • Uploading project poster on eLearn by 26th June 2nd July 2025 (Wednesday) at 11:59pm (mid-night).
  • Poster presentation: 2nd 5th July 2025 (Saturday), 2:00pm-3:30pm
  • Submission of Shiny application repository, project website repository, project poster, Minutes of Meeting and Peer Evaluation: 6th July 2025 (Sunday) by 11:59pm (mid-night)

Project Deliverable

Project Website

At the beginning of the project, project teams are required to create a project website by using Quarto. The project website should include, beside others, project overview, prototypes, storyboards, analysis and results, poster and user guide. The project website repository must be uploaded on github and publish on Netlify. Git must be used to maintain a complete project version control including the application and project documents. By the end of the project, the project team must pack the final version of the Github repository and upload onto eLearn for final submission. The Github link also must be provided on eLearn.

Minutes of Meeting

Each project team are required to maintain a comprehensive Minutes of Meeting from the beginning of the project until the end of the project. Each minutes of meeting should include but not limit to the discussion, disagreements, and consensus made and action items agreed within the team. The Minutes of Meeting should also record the division of labour and the considerations involved in the decision made.

The following links provided useful guides on how to prepare the minutes of a meeting:

  1. How to Write Meeting Minutes: Examples + Best Practices
  2. How To Write Effective Meeting Minutes(with Templates and Samples)

The Minutes of Meeting must be uploaded on eLearn within 24hrs after the meeting ended.

Poster

The project poster should provide an overview of your project. It should include, but not limited to the following information:

  • Issues and problems - A clear statement of the issues or/and problems your project addresses.

  • Motivation - An explanation of why the issues and/or problems are interesting and what make them difficult to solve.

  • Approach - A description of the techniques or algorithms you used to solve the problem.

  • Results - Screenshots and a working demo of the system you built.

  • Future Work - An explanation of how the work could be extended.

The dimensions for the poster must conform to the International Standards Organization (ISO) poster size format (A1).

  • Size = ISO A1 (594 × 841mm or 23.39 × 33.11 inci)
  • Resolution = 300dpi or above
  • Image dimension at 300 dpi: 7,016 x 9,933 pixels
  • File format = jpeg

Please ensure that the poster is in high resolution.

Note: The poster will be considered a final deliverable, so don’t forget to apply good visual design and data visualisation principles and best practice to your poster.

Peer Evaluation

During the townhall presentation, students are required to visit at least three poster booths and evaluate the Shiny applications designed and developed by them. By the end of the poster presentation, each project team are required to submit, as a group, three peer evaluation reports in a single MS Word file. The peer evaluation template can be found on eLearn.

Final Deliverables

The final deliverable will include:

  • Deployment of the Web-enabled Visual Analytics Application on shinyapps.io by RStudio.
  • Artifact including the ShinyApp codes, data and all r modules.
  • User Guide - Step-by-step guide on how to use the data visualisation functions designed.
  • Project poster
  • Minutes of Meeting

The final deliverable must be uploaded into the Dropbox of e-Learn (e.g. LMS). It must in a single zip file format. If the file size is beyond the file size allocated by eLean, it can be uploaded on SMU OneDrive.

Grading

The visual analytics project will account for 30% of your final grade in the course. The distribution of marks for each stage of the project are as follows:

  • Project website 15%
  • Poster 10%
  • Minutes of Meeting 10%
  • Peer Evaluation 15%
  • ShinyApp 50%

The course instructor will consider strongly the novelty of the idea (If it has never been done before, you will get lots of credit!), how it addresses the problem at hand, the methodology you employ in doing the research, and your technical skill in implementing the idea.

Grading criteria for poster

The poster will be graded based on the following criteria:

  • Clear communication of key aspects of solution
  • Clear communication of design approaches
  • Clear communication of arguments for proposed solution
  • Craft quality of the solution

Sample Projects

Note that the following examples are for references purposes. You are urge to use your own creativity and innovation to design the application

AY2021-22 January Term

AY2021-22 April Term

AY2022-2023 January Term

AY2022-2023 April Term

AY2023-2024 January Term

AY2023-2024 April Term

Q & A

If you have any question, please post it on Piazza.