Inspiration

We ate everyday at the two dining halls of the University of Rochester's River Campus for over a month - and probably for the next year at least. We all miss our home-cooked food from our families dearly. Home-cooked food is good food, and what better way to find good food than using the University's hive mind together? That's what UR Mom's Food serve - a way to rate food in the campus for others to use - and to relieve their taste buds!

What it does

This app will let the users choose the day, dining hall, and time and show the menus based on the users' choice. Then, the users can choose the dishes that they eat on that day and rate that whole choice with the rating, by clicking in the corresponding number of stars. After that, the app will upgrade the average rating of each dish and recommend the users of the dish that have good rating among all users in their next meals.

How we built it

First, we use BeautifulSoup4 in Python to scrape the datas from the UR Dining web. After that, we formatted and cleaned the data, and store them under a JSON file. For front-end, we use the HTML, CSS, JS to design the website.

Challenges we ran into

At first, we tried to build an AI model to detect the main dishes among the menu but to no avail. Therefore, we manually listed the main dishes among that huge data of dishes. Next, we tried to build an API by using FastAPI for the web. However, as the data scraped is too large (approximately 225,000 lines), the API broke down so we cannot use that.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of scraping that huge amount of data from the school's dining hall and then we are able to process the data without getting errors and long run time

What we learned

We learned a lot about BeautifulSoup and the collaboration skills

What's next for UR Mom's Food

We will try to connect our database online using an API and then build & train an AI model to suggest a meal based on the ratings and personal preferences

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