Research Connect BD

💡 Inspiration

In Bangladesh, underprivileged or undergraduate researchers often struggle to find advanced laboratory equipment (like an XRD machine, high-end drones, or NVIDIA GPU clusters) because there is no centralized system to check their availability. While global platforms like ResearchGate help network scholars, they completely fail at tracking local physical resources and equipment availability. ResearchConnect BD was inspired by the need to bridge this gap, democratize scientific tools, and create an AI-powered hub tailored specifically for the Bangladeshi research ecosystem.

🚀 What it does

⚠️ Important Note for Reviewers/Judges: To test the AI Research Co-Pilot (Chatbot & Email Generator) features live, you must first click the Settings icon/panel in the UI and enter your own Google Gemini API Key. The client-side search and lab filtering work instantly out of the box without any key!

ResearchConnect BD is a centralized directory and resource-sharing network for Bangladeshi researchers and universities.

• Smart Search & Filtering: Users can search for local researchers, projects, and specific laboratory machinery dynamically.
• Live Equipment Tracking: It displays the real-time availability status ("Available" or "Booked") of expensive lab equipment across multiple top universities like BUET, DU, RU, SUST, and BAU.
• AI Research Co-Pilot: Integrated with Gemini AI, it helps students draft formal outreach emails to professors and generate research proposals locally and securely using their own API key.

🛠️ How we built it

• Framework: Next.js (React) for a blazing-fast, server-rendered user experience.
• Styling: Tailwind CSS for a clean, modern, and highly responsive user interface.
• AI Engine: Google Gemini Pro API via the official Google Gen AI SDK for driving the AI Co-Pilot features.
• State & Data Management: Clean client-side TypeScript mapping for lightning-fast keyword filtering across localized data sets.

🚧 Challenges we faced

• Handling the Search Intent: Making sure that clicking long complex tags (e.g., "XRD machine availability for materials research" or "Genomics labs studying rice salinity tolerance") successfully fetched partial case-insensitive data required advanced regex and search logic tweaking.
• Secure API Key Handling: Since putting raw API keys on GitHub gets them blocked instantly, we architected the platform to allow judges/users to safely put their own Gemini API key directly into the UI settings, securing local browser-level operations without handling runtime crashes.

🎉 Accomplishments that we're proud of

• Building a working prototype with 25+ real-world simulated researcher profiles and 15+ advanced university labs from Bangladesh.
• Creating a robust search experience that works smoothly even without an immediate API connection.
• Giving a highly polished, professional design to the entire dashboard.

📚 What we learned

We learned a lot about localized context engineering in AI, proper environment variable handling for open-source submissions, and how to optimize complex nested item filtering in React.

🔮 What's next for ResearchConnect BD

• Real-time Booking System: Implementing an approval workflow where professors can approve or deny equipment booking requests directly from the dashboard.
• Cross-University Verification: Integrating institutional email checks to verify active academic credentials automatically.

Built With

• ai
• css
• gemini
• generative
• google
• next.js
• react
• tailwind
• typescript