FoundU

Team Picture!
Award Group Picture! (Abhi fell asleep, so we photoshopped him in)
Logo

Inspiration

Every UMass student has experienced or witnessed the stress of losing a UCard. Whether it's at the dining hall, library, or gym, UCards are constantly being misplaced across campus. Currently, when someone finds a lost UCard, they often don't know how to contact the owner, and the card either ends up at a random lost-and-found location or, worse, never makes it back to its owner. We realized this pain point during a conversation at Blue Wall when one of our team members found a UCard on an empty table. After spending 15 minutes trying to find the owner through social media, we thought: Then FoundU was born.

What it does

FoundU streamlines the process of returning lost UMass UCards through a simple, automated system:

When someone finds a UCard, they use the app to take a photo
The Google Vision API automatically extracts the student's name from the card image
The system uses Puppeteer to scrape the UMass People Finder website to locate the student's email
The finder can input the location where they found the card or provide their contact information
Using Nodemailer, the system automatically sends an email to the cardholder with the card's photo and retrieval details

How we built it

Frontend Development

Built using React Native with Expo for cross-platform compatibility
Implemented rn-elements for UI components and styling
Integrated Expo Location API for capturing geographic data
Created a user-friendly interface for capturing and uploading UCard images

Backend Architecture

Node.js and Express.js server handling API endpoints
Multer middleware for processing image uploads
Integration with Google Vision API for text extraction from UCard images
Custom Puppeteer automation for scraping email addresses from UMass People Finder
Nodemailer implementation for automated email notifications
Secure session management using cookies for People Finder authentication

Challenges we ran into

Implementing reliable OCR through Google Vision API to accurately extract names from UCard images in various lighting conditions
Creating a robust scraping solution that could maintain authenticated sessions with UMass People Finder
Ensuring secure and efficient handling of image data between the mobile app and backend server
Managing cross-platform compatibility issues in React Native

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Won the Wolfram Award ($1,700) at HackUMass
Created a fully automated system that requires minimal user input to return lost UCards
Successfully integrated multiple complex technologies (OCR, web scraping, email automation) into a seamless workflow
Built a solution that addresses a real problem faced by the UMass community