Team Exact - An Distributed Experience Social Network

Inspiration

Traditional social networks rely on user-declared connections, which are often manipulated by fake accounts and fail to reflect genuine professional relationships. We wanted to create a system where networks are built on verified shared experiences, providing a more trustworthy, privacy-preserving way for people to connect professionally.

What it does Exact Demo visualizes experience-based networking by: Comparing traditional social networks with experience-based networks. Verifying shared experiences using organization matching and temporal overlap. Building connected components efficiently with a Union Find algorithm. Detecting fake accounts that struggle to integrate without verifiable experience.

Users can interact with the demo to see how isolated nodes merge into realistic, trustworthy professional clusters. How we built it Frontend: Vanilla JavaScript, D3.js for graph visualization, CSS Grid/Flexbox for responsive layout, SVG graphics.

Algorithms: Union Find with path compression for network formation. Levenshtein distance for smart organization matching. Interval intersection for temporal overlap detection.

Backend (optional): Node.js proxy server for API integrations.

Optimization: Efficient data structures, lazy evaluation, memory management for D3 simulations.

Challenges we ran into

Handling variations in organization names (e.g., “MIT” vs “Massachusetts Institute of Technology”).

Accurately detecting temporal overlaps between user experiences.

Visualizing dynamic network formation efficiently for real-time user interactions.

Simulating fake account behavior convincingly for the demo.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Built a functional experience-based network demo that resists fake account integration.

Demonstrated real-time Union Find network visualization with confidence scoring.

Developed a dual verification approach combining rule-based logic and AI prompts.

Showcased scalable, privacy-preserving professional network formation.

What we learned

Experience-based networks provide a more reliable representation of professional connections.

Algorithmic verification can scale efficiently with minimal computational overhead.

Visualization is crucial to understanding network dynamics and identifying suspicious patterns.

What's next for Team Exact - A Distributed Experience Social Network

Expand to full professional networking platforms with verified connections.

Integrate LLM-powered AI verification for large-scale networks.

Explore applications in academic collaborations, supply chain validation, and identity verification.

Improve user onboarding and real-time analytics for network health and trustworthiness.

Built With

• css-grid/flexbox-for-responsive-layout
• d3.js-for-graph-visualization
• vanilla-javascript