Inspiration
Between the thousands of 67s, sybau's and high-cortisol-24-karat-gold-dubai-chocolate-crumbl-cookie-labubu's, it's difficult to determine what's actually cringe anymore. Our inspiration stems from one of our teammates being bullied for being too "brain rot", so we decided what better way to define aura than to create a cringe-o-meter that gets the final say on who's actually losing aura.
What it does
It's a web extension that unapologetically judges you for entering anything cringe-y in a textbox: "Bruh is he mogging you bffr sybau ts pmo rn icl" is now the thing of the past as you will be personally met with Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson side-eyeing your stink; gone are the days you're questioning your existential unc-ness.
How we built it
We built this application using JavaScript scripts; Within the scripts, we used Gemini from Google Console Cloud, BERTweet from Hugging Face
Challenges we ran into
Having only 2 out of 4 of our members with extensive coding backgrounds created an imbalance scale initially, and naturally it was going to be a big learning curve for everybody to adapt to each other's learning speed. Throughout the process, there was this constant back-and-forth; even simple things, like GitHub syntax, were confusing for the other 2 members, so some things took more times than others.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Nevertheless, we persevered and with the knowledge of our two experts, we slowly made progress and were able to finalize a product that WORKS! Moreover, given the silly nature of this hackathon, we were able to have fun the entire time; from conjuring brain rot and memes to giggling at the slightest noise, this has been by far the most joy we have ever felt in a hot minute.
What we learned
Aside from new brain rot terminologies that we learnt today, each of us was able to either hone our skills or expand our horizons with new models and resources that were utilized in our project. For instance, as a Computational Linguistics Joint Major, I had the opportunity to explore NLQ (Natural Language Query) on Hugging Face, a platform that holds thousands of models that extend NPL. Basically, you could say that we... cooked.
What's next for AuraMonitor
The possibilities are endless when it comes to Gen Z slangs. As time passes, humans will naturally create more memes and who knows what our next "67" could be. Our silly product aims to capture the little nuances of this magical part of being human: while yes, your aura may be lost—because let's be honest, who enjoys being spammed with random combinations of the alphabet?—we hope it can bring just a little bit of fun and awareness into your life.
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