Inspiration
Our team noticed that planning for activities with friends and family have become increasingly difficult with COVID-19. People are hesitant to reach out and set concrete plan with the concern that their friends might be too busy or have to stay home. Spending hours to send out invitations and to hash out details for get-togethers just to find that only a few can attend is extremely discouraging and we want to change that. Our team decided to build a App to break the ice and reconnect our communities using AI technologies.
What it does
Our app acts as bulletin boards for activities and events that the users are interested in. A user can create an post by filling out a name, description, and number of slots for friends. From there, the app will identify the key highlights of the activity using google-cloud language AI and tag the post with appropriate labels. Using the labels, the app will share the post with friends that have similar interest and even provide a image that matches the activity!
How we built it
Our team built the frontend of the app using react-native with Typescript. For our backend, we used Firebase Firestore along with some google-cloud AI APIs. We also developed a project specific API using Node.js to bridge the frontend and the backend, and for filtering and formatting information between the two.
Challenges we ran into
We had a challenging time modeling highly relational dataset using NoSQL for our app. We struggled with balancing data concurrency across shared information and having fast and simple querying. In the end we decided to duplicate a small subset of information that is unlikely to change.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud of what we have built over this short time span and the new technologies we decided to explore.
What I learned
We learned how to integrate google-cloud computing tools into mobile apps and developed critical systems design and data modeling techniques.
What's next for JoinMe
Our team is excited to scale JoinMe’s backend system to withstand the strain of a large pool of users. We hope to give a multitude of students the opportunity to effectively connect and reintegrate smoothly back into campus life while using JoinMe.
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