Syllabus Parser

Leveraging OpenAI's API, we empower users by creating a schedule for them. We did this by parsing a user-provided syllabus and returning dates which may be important.

Comment 2

Inspiration

As college students who are regularly juggling a lot of tasks, we wanted to streamline the process of collecting important dates by creating this useful user interface.

What it does

Our project take a syllabus PDF input by the user and uses the OpenAI API to output a calendar of important tests and due dates for each week

How we built it

  • Using Node and Express for the backend we sent POST requests when a user chose to upload their pdf
  • Utilizing OpenAI's API we input the parsed PDF as a string and returned the output
  • With vanilla JavaScript we implemented event handlers to enable interaction with the backend

Challenges we ran into

  • Connecting frontend and backend with proxies
  • POST requests timing out from chaining with OpenAI
  • Learning JavaScript and how to parse PDFs

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • We as a team were really proud of learning how to incorporate external API's in our own project for the first time
  • With a majority of the team having little experience developing with JavaScript, we were proud to have a finished project which actually works

What we learned

Similar to the accomplishments stated, we learned how to use external API's, how to debug Express API requests, and learning how to manage a github repository with a team!

What's next for Syllabus Parser

We plan to continue development by implementing new features such as:

  • Uploading multiple syllabi
  • Returning a calendar vs a text-output
  • Customization by users on what actually gets output (exams, homework, lecture and recitation times)

Built With

Share this project:

Updates