</Re>vuelta

User Dashboard
User Profile Edit Mode
Other User Profile
Event Profile

Inspiration

"Your network is your net worth." A phrase you hear all too often and rings true every time you hear the story of the non-target students that picks up their dream job.

But that brings on a question many students have: how does on build a network and what even is the value of one?

To build a network is putting yourself out there and seeking opportunities to help you grow and the value of one is something you realize as keep going down the path of life and realize it when you happen to know someone who has a niche interest in your field that can be helpful in a project you're managing.

A number of professional events and mixers around town encourage individuals in similar fields for the sole purpose to grow the network. There are also a number of series lectures around town that can share powerful insights to future professionals. But many students are unaware of these opportunities or worse, too scared to go.

Why?

Professional events can be intimidating, especially in male dominated fields like tech and finance.

That is why our solution is geared towards helping women and first-generation college students and young professional to ease the fear and be another remedy in killing imposter syndrome by connecting them with similarly minded peers

What it does

As name hints, we aim to revolutionize networking for women and first-generation college students and young professionals by being a hub for professional events (mixers, networking, classes,etc.)

How so?

Events

With the use ML and AI algorithms, the website recommends users to event that may suit their desires, interests, or choices in the user dashboard. Users are able to the abundant number of events that other users are going by clicking the see more tab. Upon clicking a specific event tab general information like date, location, ticket information, etc, pop up. However, the trademark is the specific showing of the attendance of other Revuelta users going to encourage the user to go even if they feel too shy about going because they know other individuals within their demographic are going.

The feature that makes us different is our buddy feature

Buddy Feature

In the user dashboard individuals shows a list of the users that share similar interest that are looking for a buddy to go to an event with. This similar interest variable is determined by key interest, major, clubs involved, birth date, etc. This feature occurs when a user wants specifically opt-in to pair with someone when going to an event. The user then can click a button that instantly unlocks a messaging feature so they can get to talking about going to together. This feature is useful because it allows shy students to have a "buddy" to make going less intimidating, but also encourages the other use to try going to an event that didn't thinking of going before.

How we built it

We aimed to develop the project entirely in Python, leveraging the skills of our diverse team consisting of two software developers, one cybersecurity major, and one physics major. Python's simplicity as well as its wide range of libraries such as Streamlit, Pandas, and other utilities such as the OpenAI and Groq APIs make implementing sophisticated features simple and easy for team members who have no experience building webapps such as this one, especially in the short time frame of this challenge.

Our app is built with the main page in Streamlit, leveraging Python scripts to integrate features such as a Groq-based chatbot with whom a user can ask for advice suggestions. The chatbot has access to the user's event history, preferences (in the form of keywords and the biography on their profile) and the available database of local events.

The database of events is based on Pandas, with important details corresponding to each event such as the category, a short description, the name, location, as well a list of keywords to be used by the app's ML features to bring potentially interested users to the events.

A login is implemented with Auth0, where each user profile has saved data such as their interests, a biography, a profile picture, as well as past events they've attended. Users should have the ability to add friends on the app, as well as flag events as interests, in order to find like-minded people to go with!

Challenges we ran into

This project was our team's first time building such a webapp with python let alone doing a hackathon so we were figuring how the github worked and the overall presentation. Leveraging new (to us) technologies such as Streamlit was not as graceful as it could have been, we had a difficult time getting over the differences between building a web app with python rather than technologies like HTML, CSS, JavaScript. With the constraints that Streamlit imposes, it was a challenge to redirect from Auth0 login back to our dashboard page. Implementing our Groq-based chat bot introduced several challenges into our project. We had to figure out how to process user queries and enable the chat bot to interact with our dataframes based on the queries and pre-existing data.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

As mentioned, prior, our team were not the most familiar with web dev and none of us had worked with Streamlit. It was fun having the chance to get out of our comfort zone and try out new approaches for our project. Our team is happy that our design was able to be implemented with Streamlit. Given the circumstances of the hackathon, our team is

What we learned

We learned a lot about the inner workings of trying to build a webapp. Integrating different technologies proved to be less simple than we had expected, though libraries and APIs showed us a lot about app development than we knew before.

What's next for vuelta

We want to work on properly fleshing out our webapp, moving it past being the simple and minimal demonstrable model that it is now. Properly integrating Auth0 for user authentification (which turned out to be a little more difficult than we thought!) and fully developing all of the database tools necessary for an at-scale app like ours is our next goal — which we weren't able to do within the short span of these challenges, especially with our minimal experience. This challenge showed us that branching out in software is interesting, and it's easier than we thought to build a tool to fill our, or anyone's niche! Revuelta will be our first bout in web development, and we hope for it not to be our last.