Week 1

After being allocated the project on the 21/09/2017 I immediately contacted my supervisor Aonghus to organise a meeting. We settled on the 26/09/2017 as our initial meeting date. I began by carefully looking over the Project Specification in order to get an idea of where I should start. There was a Reading section which linked to a paper entitled Great Explanations: Opinionated Explanations for Recommendation. This paper described the need for recommender systems to provide personalised recommendations depending on preferences of the user and also to explain how a recommendation was generated. The paper also contained a figure which showed a mock Webpage of a recommendation for a particular user. This figure is of importance to me as much of my work for this project will involve building a UI in React.

26/09/2017 I met with Aonghus on Tuesday where we talked about the project how we should go about starting it. We decided that for the first week I should learn React which is what the UI will be coded in. Later that day I installed Node.js and React on my computer. 27/09/2017 I began to learn React using tutorials online. I created my first app and messed around with the code to try and understand it. I watched a lot of videos which discussed exactly what React can do and what your computer does when you create-react-app. 28/09/2017 - 02/10/2017 I continued my learning of React and its component-driven style of coding before my next meeting with Aonghus.