summary.txt

CarchidiNumber
This readme file was generated on 2023-05-03 by Christopher Liu, Zeno Dancanet, Alexandra Oh (Group 3)


Carchidi Count: exploring the interconnectedness of Penn's professor network

A wise woman (Ms. Amy Calhoun) once spoke of the infamous Michael A. Carchidi, his love for teaching, and his undeniable
versatility. Professor Carchidi has taught 26 different courses across 11 different departments here at Penn
(EAS, ENGR, ENM, ESE, MATH, MEAM, OIDD, OPIM, PHYS, STAT, SYS)! Inspired by scientists' "collaboration distance" Erdős
numbers, and by actors' Bacon Numbers, this project calculates Penn Professors' Carchidi Counts.

A professor's Carchidi Count is their degree of separation from Prof. Carchidi, where there exists an edge between two
professors if they have taught the same class. This project combines graph algorithms with internet data acquisition to
retrieve professor/course information from Penn Course Review, and subsequently uses BFS to find the shortest path
between any two given professors via shared classes taught (if such paths exist).


Proposal Changes: From SkySolver to Carchidi...

This project deviates completely from our original proposal namely because we felt it would be more rewarding to
incorporate multiple topics from the class and use as many skills we developed in NETS150 as possible. We also thought
this idea was close to home and would be fun for Penn students and faculty to play around with :)

Zeno worked on the visualizer, Alex built GraphExplorer, and Chris built the user guide and did all the web-scraping
in PCRParser (and all-around guided/mentored the team, thank you Chris -Alex).