Date of Award

2020

First Advisor

Marina Barsky

Second Advisor

Michael Bergman

Abstract

This thesis is a redesign of Craigslist. We set out with the intention to bring an old service into the modern era. We wanted to recreate the service in order to make it new, efficient, and smart. To accomplish these tasks, we spanned many different computer science domains. The thesis consists of three main parts all of which used services provided by a cloud computing platform. The first part deals with updating the main user interface of Craigslist and providing a more visual site that is map focused. This allows the user on a touch screen device to use more natural controls like swiping, panning, and zooming with their fingers. This map functionality was obtained by using Google Map APIs. The second part dealt with the main service of Craigslist, which is providing the ads/postings. In order to provide this functionality, Amazon Web Services (AWS) tools like Lambda functions and DynamoDB were used. This functionality also incorporates machine learning when checking if a contract is appropriate to publish. The third part is a chat functionality that allows users to communicate with each other when describing logistics related to a particular contract. This functionality was provided using a serverless approach in AWS. We achieve a prototype of this redesign with the desired functionalities.

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