EduLink

Selected Track: AI + Education

Problem statement and target users

Students and self-learners often study several subjects at once, but their notes sit in separate documents and nothing shows how the ideas relate. The most useful insights are often where two fields overlap, yet finding those overlaps takes background knowledge, and finding credible research on them takes even more time. EduLink aims to solve that issue by generating links between any two subjects, regardless of how distantly related they may be.

EduLink is built for undergraduates, self-taught learners, and interdisciplinary students or early researchers who want to turn their own notes into a starting point for deeper study and project ideas.

Technical approach and components

The user pastes notes on two subjects into a React and Vite web app. A Spring Boot backend (Java 21) sends them to an LLM served through Featherless AI’s OpenAI-compatible API (Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct), which returns bridging concepts as structured JSON. Each concept comes with an explanation grounded in the user’s notes and a short academic search query. The backend then queries the arXiv API for each query, with every keyword required to match, results sorted by relevance, and an app-wide 3-second gap between requests to respect arXiv’s rate limit. Papers are de-duplicated across concepts and returned with titles, authors, dates, abstracts, and links.

Two features reuse the same LLM service with their own prompts:

Project Generator: takes the connections plus the user’s skill level, available time, and team size, and returns a tailored project idea with a tool list, a getting-started guide, and concrete steps. Ed the T-Rex: a mascot who gives a short, friendly summary of the key concepts in the notes.

The system includes input validation, retries and tolerant parsing for unreliable model output, and failure handling so one failed search doesn’t lose the other results. The API key stays server-side, and the whole app packages into a single runnable JAR for one-command setup.

Real-world impact

EduLink turns a manual, expertise-dependent task, spotting cross-disciplinary links and locating literature on them, into a few minutes of work. Because every connection is tied to the user’s own notes and backed by links to real papers, learners get credible reading material instead of generic AI text, and they can verify everything themselves. The project generator also turns that understanding into something they can build, which makes the learning more active and practical. Together these lower the barrier to interdisciplinary learning and early research, especially for people without a mentor to point them in the right direction.

Dinosaur Image Attribution: Dinosaur icons created by Magnific - Flaticon