Free Room Finder

A community-driven study space finder

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Inspiration

Many students struggle to find a place to study after classes every day. This service provides an easy and accessible way to provide the students with available rooms through Facebook Messenger.

What it does

Using the capabilities of IBM Cloud, our service helps you to find and report free rooms around the campus. By simply asking for a place to study in a natural language, the AI will list the places that are available based on previous user reports.

How we built it

We have created a node flow using Node-Red in order to build the service and Watson Assistant to process human language. The Node-Red instance interacts with the end-user using Facebook API then parses the user input to the Watson Assistant instance. Then, the Assistant extracts the context and the intent of the user and then passes relevant information back to the Node-Red instance. If the user interacts with a saved information, then the Assistant sends a command to a JSON file to retrieve and modify relevant data, handled by Node-Red.

Challenges we ran into

Getting used to the new environment and language

  • outdated tutorials

Connecting Facebook API to IBM Cloud Instances

  • Strange bugs occurring due to obscure documentation

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Creating a fully functional product

  • Utilizing IBM Cloud services

What we learned

  • IBM Cloud services

  • More JavaScript

What's next for Study Space Finder

Expand the service to include general spaces Currently, the service can only process information about specific rooms in a building.

Use of IBM Cloud's IoT capabilities to retrieve a more detailed information Using IoT devices, it is possible to scan for wifi signals to estimate how busy an area is. This with IBM Cloud IoT support, it could be possible to inform users where to avoid in real time without being dependent on user reports.

Spam Filter The current application assumes all user inputs are correct. However, if there is more data available, it would be possible to implement a spam filter.

Party Finder Using similar technique, our service can be used to tell people about parties that are happening live.

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