Know My Professor

Search "christopher nitta" and see a UC Davis computer science professor's research history.

Inspiration

RateMyProfessor.com is a biased forum where students post comments about professors. I wanted to create a data-driven alternative to learning about your professor.

What it does

KnowMyProf.com highlights a professor's research history. It also shows an entire university's research history.

How I built it

Hosted on an Azure VM. Calls Microsoft Cognitive Services Academic Knowledge API in Flask app. Vega data visualization framework used for histograms.

Challenges I ran into

The naming conventions Microsoft used for the academic knowledge API are pretty poor -- one letter strings to describe response fields are not very readable in code. I mapped the response fields to more meaningful names to overcome this limitation.

Rate limiting was strict when debugging, especially on the CalcHistogram endpoint. It would have been cool to have a special API key to get by these limits.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Deployed a new data visualization JS library and built a coherent tool using Microsoft APIs!

What I learned

Microsoft has cool APIs that can power applications! It's all about using them in a context that makes sense, like here using the academic knowledge API in a website for academic community members.

Also, Azure VMs are speedy and have very fast network connections!