BU One

Inspiration

Campus life is scattered across portals, calendars, and websites. We built BU One to bring student essentials, academic planning, and campus connections into one place.

What it does

BU One brings campus life and academic planning into one app.

Student dashboard: Classes, deadlines, grades, attendance, and dining balances.
Personalized events: Recommendations based on interests and saved events, with schedule-conflict filtering.
AI assistant: Gemini-powered answers about academics, events, and campus services.
Office routing: Department suggestions with official links and clarification when needed.
Syllabus processing: Upload PDFs or text, review extracted deadlines and policies, and get cited answers.
Study planning: Assignment breakdowns, weekly schedules, workload forecasts, and catch-up plans.
Grade and prerequisite checks: Explore hypothetical scores, required final scores, and course eligibility.
Study partners: Match by courses, availability, and preferences; send invitations and chat.
Student marketplace: Photo listings, search and filters, saved items, buyer–seller chats, and reporting.

How we built it

We used React Native, Expo, and TypeScript for the app and Python and FastAPI for the backend. Event discovery uses TF-IDF, cosine similarity, and K-means clustering. Support-office routing uses Model2Vec embeddings and logistic regression.

Academic search combines local embeddings with keyword matching; Python handles scheduling and grade calculations. We also trained experimental study-ranking and marketplace-review models on synthetic data.

Challenges

We had to reconcile inconsistent sources, fit recommendations and study plans around schedules, and ground AI answers in evidence.

What we learned

We learned how to connect mobile development, local ML, and AI tool calling while keeping calculations deterministic, sources traceable, and extracted syllabus information subject to student review.

What’s next

Finish mobile integration, connect authorized campus services, and validate matching, recommendations, and request routing with real student feedback.