Alt Bridge

A bulletin board that automatically compiles upcoming events at Carnegie Mellon from mailing lists.

The goal was subscribe a dummy email address to the mailing lists of all public event organizations at CMU. This would include not just the info listed on the bridge (which tends to be incomplete) but also

• University lectures series
• Campus Wide announcements
• College specific activities
• Concerts, shows, and other cultural events
• Volunteering opportunities
• etc...

Features

Users can sign up for their own account and add clubs they are in to customize the front page. In addition, users can filter through the events that are displayed on the front page by organization, location, and topics.

Tech

Using Gmail's email API we query an inbox we set up (cmuactivitieslist@gmail.com) for new emails and move them into trash once received. The content of these are then parsed and then run through spaCy's entity classifier. We look for dates, times, orgs, event names, and locations then build a list of all such entities in each email. We filter those emails with high numbers of conflicting entities and match the correct date to the correct time to the correct event via l1 clustering. This information is enrolled in an Email object which is formatted and used to build Django models of corresponding events and orgs on the site.

Built With

• css
• django
• html
• javascript
• python
• spacy