ExCALibur

Are you wondering what to do after a long day of classes? Or maybe the weekend is here and you have nothing to do? ExCALibur - the AI assistant that keeps you busy and entertained :D

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Inspiration

Last Friday the three of us realized something quite daunting - we had NOTHING to do. All of our homework was done, and no one wanted to stay home on a Friday night... IT'S FRIDAY NIGHT AFTER ALL... Well, that's great but the problem was that we really had nothing better to do. We checked our college's events website... jazz ensemble night... No, thanks... Anything interesting on Eventbrite? A party with old Michael Bublé songs... Not interested... Well, it turns out that there was a pretty neat tech conference happening in NYC that wasn't posted on any of the two websites. Two days ago we found out about it and we couldn't believe our luck. "What if there was an app that can help us find events instead of us doing it?", one of us said. "Yeah... that sounds interesting! Do you want to try implementing it at HackPrinceton?" And that is how the idea of ExCALibur was born.

What it does

So, what does it actually do? ExCALibur is an AI powered tool that takes a look at your weekly schedule (Google/Outlook/Something-else Calendar) and based on your availability, interest, location, etc., provides you with suggestions about events you can go to. The result? You wasting less time, having more fun, and (potentially) expanding your network by meeting new people :D

How we built it

For our backend, we used Flask. As the orchestrator of the whole application, the Flask process has 4 main functions: 1. Gathering data from your Calendar and the event criteria that you've set; 2. Parsing that data to Perplexity's AI model that scrapes the web and returns all events in your area based on your availability, interests, location, etc.; 3. Saving that data into MongoDB; 4. Parsing the data to the frontend that was written in HTML, CSS, and JS.

Challenges we ran into

It turns out that having backend experts and having little-to-none frontend skills is something that can delay the development process. And while the frontend of the application is certainly not "a state-of-the-art", we believe we managed to compensate by focusing on the "inner beauty" of our idea, the backend logic that does all the magic.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The greatest accomplishment that we're proud of is the fact that we were able to implement the whole logic behind the app, while being able to go to almost every workshop, go on a mini tour around Princeton and get prepared for our Operating Systems exam on Monday. Not bad in our opinion ;)

What we learned

That we are a great team and next time we definitely need to recruit someone who's good at doing UI/UX.

What's next for ExCALibur

Continuing the development and potentially expanding it outside of the range of our main audience - students. On top of that there are many features like multiple location search, long-term planning, etc. that we can implement and make our application even better.

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