UMass Pilot — One Login. Every Class.

Inspiration

Being a student at UMass Amherst means constantly switching between Canvas, Gradescope, Piazza, Echo360, and other platforms just to keep up with classes.

Assignments are scattered, deadlines change, lecture materials are difficult to find, and important announcements get buried. Even powerful AI tools like ChatGPT don't know what's happening in your courses unless you manually upload everything.

We wanted to change that.

What if every UMass student had an AI study partner that already understood their classes?

That's why we built UMass Pilot.

What it does

UMass Pilot is an AI-powered academic assistant designed specifically for UMass Amherst students. It brings course information together into one intelligent workspace.

Our core features include:

Unified dashboard: See upcoming assignments, deadlines, and course announcements in one place instead of checking multiple websites.
Smart deadline tracking: Keep track of changes to important assignments and exams.
AI study assistant: Ask questions about your courses and receive context-aware answers powered by Google Gemini.
Personalized study tools: Generate study plans, practice quizzes, and flashcards based on course materials.
Verified citations: AI responses reference actual course materials, allowing students to check where information came from.
Canvas integration: Connect real UMass Canvas courses and synchronize academic information.

Our broader vision is to integrate Gradescope, Piazza, Echo360, and other academic platforms into the same experience.

How we built it

We designed UMass Pilot around three main components:

1. Frontend: We used Next.js, React, TypeScript, and Tailwind CSS to build a responsive student dashboard with course views, deadline tracking, and an interactive AI chat interface.

2. Backend and data synchronization: We built a Python FastAPI backend with a synchronization system that retrieves academic information and organizes it in Supabase using PostgreSQL.

3. AI agent: We integrated Google Gemini with tools that retrieve relevant academic information. Instead of allowing the AI to invent references, our backend validates citations against retrieved source material.

We also implemented authentication checks, student-specific data access controls, and a demo environment populated with sample UMass courses.

Challenges we ran into

One of our biggest challenges was working with academic platforms that weren't designed to communicate with each other.

We had to think carefully about authentication, protecting student information, and synchronizing course data reliably.

Another major challenge was AI reliability. For an academic assistant, a fabricated deadline or nonexistent citation could seriously mislead a student. We addressed this by separating structured academic data from AI-generated responses and validating references before displaying them.

Accomplishments we're proud of

We're especially proud of building more than a basic AI chatbot.

UMass Pilot combines a real course synchronization pipeline, a functional student interface, and an AI assistant that uses academic context to help students study.

We also developed automated evaluations, citation validation, and a backup demo environment to test the experience.

Most importantly, we built something designed around a problem we experience ourselves as UMass students.

What we learned

This project taught us how to connect modern AI systems with real-world data, design reliable backend services, and build a full-stack application collaboratively under hackathon time constraints.

We also learned that useful AI isn't just about generating convincing answers. It's about providing accurate, relevant, and verifiable information.

What's next

We want to expand UMass Pilot with deeper Gradescope, Piazza, and Echo360 integrations, automatic calendar synchronization, and more personalized academic planning.

Long term, we envision a university-supported integration that gives every UMass student access to a secure AI academic assistant.

One login. Every class. One smarter way to study.