The Lost Information Problem
How might we create a centralised, searchable system for university announcements?
The problem
Where students run into it today.
The announcement went out. It is now unfindable.
Why it matters
An announcement has a half-life measured in hours once it scrolls past in a group chat.
Missing one notice can mean missing a deadline. The consequence is disproportionate to the cause.
This is the most tractable problem on this page — a well-scoped build with a visible result, which makes it a good first ACM project.
Possible directions
Several credible approaches, no obvious winner. Choosing between them is part of the work.
Single searchable archive
One place where every announcement lands, with full-text search and no login wall for public notices.
Categorisation and subscription
Let a student follow only their department, year and electives instead of receiving everything.
Deadline extraction
Pull dates out of announcement text and turn them into something a calendar can read.
Technologies & difficulty
Several moving parts that have to agree with each other — an API, a store, a frontend. The difficulty lives in the seams.
Difficulty describes the work, not the person. A level 04 problem is not closed to a first-year — it just needs a team and a longer runway.
Potential project
Campus Information Hub
A searchable, categorised archive of announcements with per-student subscriptions and extracted deadlines.
Skills needed
Open roles & possible team
- Frontend
Search interface, archive browsing, mobile-first reading
- Backend
Indexing, categorisation, subscription logic
- UX
Information architecture and notification design
Research questions
The things nobody in the group can currently answer.
What makes an announcement findable six months later — its title, its date, or its consequences?
Can categorisation be inferred reliably, or does it need a human in the loop?
Next steps
What the first two weeks would sensibly look like.
- 1
Archive a term’s worth of public notices manually and try to search them. That first pass teaches you the schema.
- 2
Ship search before subscriptions. Search is the thing people will actually use.