Revolutionizing Food Delivery Services with Home Cooked Meals; The Effect of Facebook and WeChat on Political Polarization in Society

Technical Synthesis:

Food delivery services take advantage of consumers’ desire for convenience, allowing them to stay at home and not worry about cooking for themselves. Consumers have increasingly ordered food from delivery services and avoided preparing food from scratch, even though home-cooked meals provide a more nutritious and well-rounded diet. The goal of the Capstone project is to develop a food delivery service, called HomeEats, that is hosted as a web application specifically for delivering home-cooked meals. HomeEats was developed using the Python Django Framework and the site is hosted on an AWS server for production purposes. The capstone team followed the scrum agile methodology to develop the web application. This application will give at-home chefs the ability to create a HomeEats cook account and post a list of home-cooked meals as a menu. Customers can make a HomeEats customer account to view and order meals from the application. This web application combines the consumer’s desire for convenience while also providing passionate at-home chefs the opportunity to cook.

STS Synthesis:

In recent years, the usage of social media has increased exponentially. While social media is a great way to keep in touch with friends and family while sharing personal updates, it has mutated to include a lot of other uses. Many social media platforms, chief among them Facebook, allow organizations to have their own “account”, promote paid content, and even allow regular users to share media/articles from sources outside of Facebook (like news articles). Facebook, though incredibly wide-reaching, is not the leading social media platform everywhere in the world. In China, the predominant social media platform is called WeChat. I chose to focus on the nuanced relationship between the structure of Facebook/WeChat and political polarization because I believe the relationship could be very dangerous to society. The impacts of political polarity, especially when uninformed, can be devastating to a society which is why I will be delving deeper into the subject as I hope to unfold how Social Media platforms, particularly Facebook and WeChat, lead to political polarization in society.

The technical and STS thesis are not related.

School of Engineering and Applied Sciences
Bachelor of Science in Computer Science
Technical Advisor: Ahmed Ibrahim
STS Advisor: Tsai-Hsuan Ku
Technical Team Members: Habib Karaky, Ankith Yennu, Jack Short, Steven Morrison, Isabel Kershner, Guillermo Saavedra