Inspiration
Whether just for a summer, for an year, or longer, people are always looking for someone to split living costs with. The often stressful process of searching for people to live with would be significantly eased by a centralized system for finding and matching with roommates.
What it does
Anybody who is looking for roommates can register for our system. They will submit information on location and time of residence, as well as information about lifestyle. This may include quiet hours, cleanliness, and number of housemates. They'll also enter information about what they're looking for in their housemates. Our algorithm will then match people with potential housemates.
How we built it
We focused mostly on the back end, using a basic text interface to interact with users for now. User inputs were taken in and stored in a dataframe. Then, we filtered among the remaining users for people who matched location and time. Then, we ranked the remaining users by how well they matched the given preferences. Matched people were informed and allowed to exchange contact information.
Challenges we ran into
One challenge we faced was finding a way to compare qualitative, text-based preferences between different people. Our workaround was to map certain phrases to values, which we could then compare quantitatively.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We were proud of being able to implement an application that (once fully developed) would be something we could imagine using.
What we learned
We learned a lot about the thought process that goes into creating an application for general use, rather than the personal research code we were most used to writing. One of our members has little coding experience with Python, so he was able to learn a bit about the basics of the language.
What's next for Roomie
Moving forward, we plan to make a more aesthetic GUI instead of the simplistic text-based interface we have. We can also expand the information we collect in order to better match people.
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