Research Collaboration Workspace for Student Teams

Undergraduate research teams — the kind building a low-cost sensor prototype and aiming at a conference paper — run a genuinely complex project: literature survey of dozens of papers, hardware builds, firmware versions, calibration datasets, field trials, and a paper draft cycling through mentor review. In practice this lives across WhatsApp groups, personal drives and email threads; the mentor cannot see progress without asking, document versions collide, and nobody can reconstruct who did what when the paper's author list is debated. This project builds CoLab, a research collaboration workspace for a student team. A project overview tracks tasks, milestones, documents and the countdown to the draft deadline; a kanban task board carries work from to-do through review to done with owners and tags; shared documents are versioned with author names and review states; and the mentor reviews drafts, comments inline, and signs off milestones — with a recent-activity feed keeping the whole team's work visible.

1. The project lead creates the workspace with the research topic, target venue (e.g. IEEE INDICON) and the paper-draft deadline that drives the countdown.
2. Team members and the faculty mentor are added with roles; responsibility areas (hardware, firmware, data pipeline, literature) are assigned explicitly.
3. Work is broken into tasks on the kanban board with owners, tags and due dates; tasks move from to-do through in-progress and review to done.
4. Milestones (literature survey complete, prototype built, calibration done, field trial, paper draft) are defined with evidence criteria and sign-off dates.
5. Documents — drafts, datasets, decks, firmware — are uploaded to shared documents with version numbers, authors and review states; finals lock against edits.
6. The mentor reviews drafts, leaves comments and signs off milestones; every action lands in the recent-activity feed with a timestamp.
7. The overview dashboard continuously aggregates task completion, milestone progress, documents under review and days remaining to the deadline.

Tech stack:

• HTML5 · CSS3 · vanilla JavaScript (ES6)
• Single-file front-end app (no build step)
• browser localStorage persistence
• Kanban drag-state board UI
• Version-history data model
• Responsive CSS Grid/Flexbox layout

• [Project overview dashboard] Tasks done, milestones hit, documents under review and days to the draft deadline in one header — the state of the research at a glance.
• [Kanban task board] To-do, in-progress, review and done columns with owner initials, tags (hardware, firmware, data, paper, survey, admin), due dates and progress percentages.
• [Milestone tracking] Milestones carry evidence (42 papers reviewed, prototype built, calibration done) and sign-off dates; the next milestone and its start date stay visible.
• [Versioned shared documents] Paper drafts, datasets, presentations and firmware zips are versioned with author names, edit history and review states; final files lock against further edits.
• [Mentor review loop] The mentor comments on drafts, requests changes and signs off milestones; review comments appear in the activity feed with timestamps.
• [Team directory] Members carry roles (project lead, data lead, member, mentor) and responsibility areas, so ownership of every workstream is explicit.
• [Recent activity feed] Pushes, task moves, comments, uploads and scheduled syncs are logged with relative timestamps — the team's heartbeat without status meetings.

• Complete CoLab web app source code (single-file HTML/CSS/JS)
• Seeded demo dataset (full research project: tasks, milestones, documents, team)
• Project report PDF (background, workspace design, data model, methodology, screenshots)
• PPT presentation for final review
• Viva Q&A preparation document
• User manual (team and mentor roles)
• Installation/deployment guide