Shadkan - Capstone Abstract
Yehuda Cohen, Rohit Lakshmanatirthakatte, Amizan Jaleel
Advisor: Prof. Shantenu Jha
Shadkan is packaged as a mobile dating app. A user’s first encounter with Shadkan prompts him or her to connect his or her facebook account, giving permissions to us to piggy-back on top of his or her social graph.
He or she must then set an assortment of preferences regarding the kind of friends he or she is interested in dating. This allows us to “narrow the playing field” to only those friends who fit the demographics and preferences they themselves define. We do not process our data for abnormalities in people’s preferences because we are aware that different folk have different emotions. We call this principle GIGO (garbage in garbage out).
Perhaps the most important of these preferences are a user’s desperation threshold and a user’s availability. A user’s desperation threshold tells us how desperate they are so that we know how liberal to allow our backend matchmaker to be. A user’s availability determines whether other friends can be matched up with him or her.
Once these and other preferences have been set up, we provide a beautiful interface where users can rate their beautiful friends. This rating process is broken down into two phases. The first involves a simple question, “Would you ever date John Smith?”, where John Smith is a variable corresponding to a user’s potential match. If the user answers “No”, they are immediately directed to the next potential match. If, however, the answer is “Yes”, they are directed to another screen.
This next screen asks them to elaborate by sliding a “heat meter” until they feel it represents their emotional state. Once they make a selection, they are directed to their next potential match.
In the meanwhile, our Shadkan server is watching with a keen eye as people pour their hearts out to their mobile phones, observing and recording their every shared sentiment. Once the Shadkan server observes that two people have rated each other, it determines a compatibility index for the pair based on their respective ratings.
This compatibility index becomes important when a user decides he or she has been sitting on the sidelines too long. User 1 can visit our Cupid’s Arrow tab, and fire his or her love arrow. This returns User 1’s most compatible match - User 2. It then notifies both users of the mutual interest. (Note that User 1’s most compatible match is not necessarily User 2’s most compatible match, but as long as the compatibility index surpasses the limit determined from User 2’s desperation meter, and User 2 is available, this does not matter. In fact, it serves to incentivize users to fire Cupid’s Arrow.)