MatchTech

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  My logo.

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  Output of the algorithm for lab seeking help.

Inspiration

I've always seen how difficult it is to network and find real opportunities as a high school student. Even though networking platforms do exist, most of the time, cold emailing or reaching out to professors on these apps/websites gets rejected or ignored. I wanted to create an app, or at least a prototype, that could specifically allow students/researchers to find these kinds of opportunities. Research is an expanding field, and as technology advances, inspiring the younger generation to get involved early on can improve the rate at which research is progressing.

What it does

MatchTech matches students, or any researcher for that matter, with other researchers who are looking for people to join their lab. The party who is looking for a lab opportunity can have certain tags on what they are looking for in a research position, and the party who wants to recruit members has certain tags on the researchers they want to join their lab. The system will decide the best match based off of the rank of the research institution/lab/university as well as the level of research the student has, and the geographical location of the two parties. Other information the users want to provide will be sent as a string such as email, starting dates, etc., meaning that the computer will not internalize this data.

How we built it

I utilized the sci-kit learn library (basic ML library) to build a system using cosine similarity to determine how similar the two parties are. I also used TF-IDF vectorization to compute similarity between the tags of a professor and student so that the system provides the best match possible.

Challenges we ran into

It was quite challenging to learn some of the formulas such as cosine similarity and TF-IDF Vectorization. With some research, I was able to make it happen.

Accomplishments we're proud of

I personally believe that MatchTech has potential in allowing more people to get into research. I feel proud in contributing to making our education industry more accessible, especially for something I see so often in my everyday life.

What's next for MatchTech

MatchTech is currently a prototype, but I would like it to expand and become a real app, not just generic to research, but so that students of different socioeconomic backgrounds and demographics are able to work on real STEM work regardless of experience level. I truly believe that education is all about exposure, and if more people are able to get access to platforms like MatchTech, more beginners will be able to get more experience, especially as the database grows and more research institutions want to work with people without advanced backgrounds.

Built With

• ai
• algorithm-design
• data-structures
• machine-learning
• python
• recommendation-system