Magna Carta / Campus Flow

What it does

Type in a college name, or other topic, and it will present the trending ideas and buzzwords being used at that campus or location. A heat map is presented of people's use of the word around the area, and around the country.

How we built it

Everything is coordinated by a .NET core application. This calls a web scraper built in python which takes all the posted articles related to the given topic, and then .NET performs natural language processing to extract keywords. These are put through a React framework to produce an interactable heatmap of word use. The map is created using the Google Maps API.

Challenges we ran into

Integrating React with .NET Customizing the Google Maps API (for example, changing the radius of individual heatmap points took a while to implement) Dealing with exponentially growing links from the web scraper; limiting recursion. Compiling python to run as a .NET application (by compile I mean making a .exe) Running .NET cross-platform (I know it's meant for this but it requires a lot of installed packages).

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Getting all these different systems, written by different team members at different times, to work together from start to finish.

What we've learned

A ton about .NET for most of us. Also, how to build web apps and systems with Django, which began as work on the side but is being integrated into the main system we've developed.

What's next?

Optimization is key now. We have begun work on parallelizing the web scraping, as well as conducting that on an external server to build up an index on wifi faster than the strained hackathon wifi.