Aggie is an open-source social and online media aggregation tool designed specifically for monitoring events in real-time by researchers at Georgia Tech. The Aggie tool is aimed at solving critical issues related to election monitoring, which is an extremely important job to help ensure a fair democratic process. Aggie assists in the process by providing a platform that monitors social media outlets like Facebook and Twitter, as well as RSS feeds. Additionally, election monitors who are located at various polling locations can send in information using a tool called ELMO. In the end, election monitors have the ability to watch the data in real-time and easily notify election officials of critical events.
Working on the eDemocracy Team at Georgia Tech, I was able to assist in the development and growth of Aggie on several fronts. Beyond overall development and testing, I worked on developing documentation and locating issues within the overall architecture. I also helped in deploying the application to monitor a local Georgia election as well as the Presidential Runoff Election in Argentina (2015/2016). We worked on developing various visualizations of the data using D3.JS and AngularJS, as well as completely redesigning the OAuth within Facebook to work on the new Facebook API.
One of the keys to ensuring a stable democratic process is maintaining a free and fair election. Election monitoring is one of the key activities performed in Democratic countries around the world to monitor for instances where election rules are broken or citizen’s rights are being limited. The eDemocracy Research Group at Georgia Tech was a team of researchers aimed at building tools and solving problems to help ensure the sanctity of elections around the world.
Open Source Technology
Web Development, Cloud Services
Javascript, NodeJS, AngularJS, Nginx, AWS