Inspiration
The life of a Berkeley student is filled with chaotic, jam-packed days of studying, stressing, and wasting time procrastinating while you're worrying that you're wasting time procrastinating. We envision this project being a tool that can make planning, socializing, time management, and living your life as easy as possible. We were inspired by the convenient Cal Schedule Planner and the popular When2Meet app to create something that easily lets you add your availability and interests, then takes it a step further by compiling your own data to help you most efficiently manage your time and maximize your lifestyle.
What it does
Currently, our project allows a user to sync their Facebook account as wells as input their schedule so that we can apply user data like news feeds and group pages to predict what types of similar events in the area someone might like to attend. Ultimately, we would like to expand our app to curate events based on the availability of the user and include connection with other APIs, including the Google Natural Language API, to allow for better and more accurate predictions.
How we built it
Our app is deployed on the Google Cloud app engine and is written using React/ Node js. We utilized multiple existing React libraries, including the bootstrap library for styling, as well as added connections to the Facebook API. We incorporated a word cloud that selects key words from users' feeds and presents this to them in order to begin gauging their interests and start predicting their schedule.
Challenges we ran into
Neither of us have written an application in React or set up any API connections, so this was a huge learning experience for us. It was difficult to find centralized information about how to use tools from the Facebook API because we weren't familiar with the syntax. We attempted to use machine learning to train a dataset and predict users' interests, as well as search the internet for future events they might be interested in. However, it proved time consuming to process the training dataset, and there was no clear way to take user data and collect it in a form that we could readily transfer to Google Cloud to use as a dataset.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Getting the Facebook API to connect to our webpage and being able to pull user data from news feeds was quite an accomplishment for us. Learning how React works and being able to piece together parts of code that each of us had worked on separately was a testament to how much we've grown during this Hackathon! Every bit of progress we made felt like an accomplishment because everything was so brand new.
What we learned
We learned an immense amount about the inner workings of the Facebook API, React, and how to work under time constraints in a dynamic environment. We found that it is possible to expand your knowledge of a coding language enough to create a whole project in just a few days, giving us the motivation to carry on and complete this project in the future.
What's next for Butterfly Effect
We hope to continue building and expanding upon the Butterfly Effect platform so we can allow our users a truly unique experience that is simple, intelligent, and social. We would love to be able to connect our app to Google Calendar and eventually incorporate machine learning so that our users have a seamless experience and are able to maximize their efficiency and lifestyle.
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