MingleMakan

Inspiration

In an age where social media is the new playground for youths, the pandemic has significantly amplified our reliance on digital connections. While social media platforms have kept us linked, the depth and quality of these interactions often remain surface-level. Our team realized that youth these days crave more than just likes and follows; they seek genuine connections, engaging conversations, and shared experiences that go beyond the screen.

Moreover, many youths today feel overwhelmed by the constant influx of information and the pressure to be creative on social media. Our model serves as a creative catalyst, providing fresh ideas and inspiration for content creation, thus alleviating some of the pressure to constantly come up with new concepts.

MingleMakan emerged from this very need – to transform the way young people connect and interact online. We saw an opportunity to infuse the digital social space with authenticity and creativity, particularly in a time when face-to-face interactions are limited. Our website application is designed for the new generation – a generation that's tech-savvy, values genuine connections, and thrives on creative expression. By providing a safe space for creative exploration and socialization, the application can help boost confidence among youths, particularly those who may feel hesitant or insecure about their creative abilities or social skills.

Additionally, our team also acknowledges that in the wake of the pandemic, the restaurant industry has faced unprecedented challenges. Many establishments have seen a significant decline in customers due to the epidemic. As such, MingleMakan was conceived as a beacon of support for these local businesses, offering a platform that not only encourages community engagement but also drives economic recovery.

As our users connect over great food, they will be directly supporting local businesses with every meetup, helping to reinvigorate the local economy and rebuild the vibrant social fabric of our neighborhoods. A win-win situation for everyone.

What it does

Find Your Tribe: MingleMakan finds friends within the user’s immediate vicinity. Whether they are at a café, a park, or attending a local event, our platform helps them discover and connect with like-minded individuals who are just a stone's throw away.
Spark Conversations That Matter: Say goodbye to awkward small talk. Our Conversational Prompts feature provides unique, thought-provoking topics that kickstart deeper conversations using a Chatbot, helping users discover fascinating stories with their new friend.
Connect through Food: If the conversation goes well, why not hangout together for a meal since the two users are nearby! To allow users to eat somewhere near and not break the bank, our application recommends the best restaurants and offers discounts to users who use our app, a win-win for everyone!
Caption This, Trend That: End the session with a selfie! Users could add flair to the picture by utilizing artificial intelligence to add witty and humorous captions to the photo which are perfect for those Instagram-worthy shots. Our feature understands the pulse of current trends, hashtags, and emojis, ensuring that the user’s posts stand out.

How we built it

Our innovative social media web application for youths, is a fusion of modern technologies and creative solutions. Built on React, utilizing the OpenAI ChatGPT API for conversation generation, and incorporating a state-of-the-art image captioning model from Hugging Face, our application is designed to offer a seamless, interactive, and enriching social experience.

Challenges we ran into

Some of the challenges that our team has faced are:

Ensuring seamless integration of external APIs (like ChatGPT and our Hugging Face transformer) with our application is extremely challenging, because all of our group members have minimal prior knowledge about MLOps.
Due to the size of the model and with the presence of high-resolution images, a significant challenge posed was to minimize response time for AI-generated content which is crucial for user satisfaction. We tried our best to balance between the size and the performance of our generative models to maximize user satisfaction.

Accomplishments we are proud of

Building a fully functional and sophisticated web application like MingleMakan in around 2 days is an incredible feat. It demonstrates our team's exceptional skills in efficient planning, coordination, and execution. Furthermore, our team has successfully harnessed the power of generative AI to address pressing social issues – the need for deeper, more meaningful connections in the digital age, and the need to revitalize the food industry.

What we learned

Through our hackathon, we have learnt to accomplish the following to solve a current pressing issue faced by youths to redefine social media for youths:

Full Stack Development
Generative AI Model Deployments (MLOPs)
API endpoint generation and integration

What’s next for MingleMakan

Since our website application uses an existing pre-trained model instead of a retrained one, our application can be improved using the following tests:

Relevance to User Context: We can conduct user testing to ensure that the model’s output aligns with user expectations and enhances their experience.
Feedback Loop: In order to Implement a feedback mechanism to which can be valuable for further tuning and improvements, we can try to gather user responses about the model’s outputs in order to fine-tune it. The results collected could be used for both evaluation of our website application as well as further refining the application.

Team69_7G_MingleMakan