Crowdfunding Support Tools WIP to appear in CHI 2013

Creative individuals increasingly rely on online crowdfunding platforms to crowdsource funding for new ventures. For novice crowdfunding project creators, however, there are few resources to turn to for assistance in the planning of crowdfunding projects. We are building a tool for novice project creators to get feedback on their project designs. One component of this tool is a comparison to existing projects. As such, we have applied a variety of machine learning classifiers to learn the concept of a successful online crowdfunding project at the time of project launch. Currently our classifier can predict with roughly 68% accuracy, whether a project will be successful or not. The classification results will eventually power a prediction segment of the proposed feedback tool. Future work involves turning the results of the machine learning algorithms into human-readable content and integrating this content into the feedback tool (pdf).