CampusPulse | Devpost

Inspiration 🤩

Today, students at the University of Toronto have to navigate through a fragmented landscape of social media and word-of-mouth to discover campus events and activities when seeking to engage with their community and expand their interests. UofT's latest innovation, CampusPulse, aims to revolutionize this experience by creating a unified platform that not only bridges the gap between students and campus activities but also tailors event recommendations to each student's interests and schedule. By integrating a comprehensive campus map, an intelligent event recommendation engine, and a conversational AI for personalized inquiries, CampusPulse ensures that every student can easily connect with clubs, workshops, and gatherings that resonate with their passions. Whether you're looking to meet fellow ML enthusiasts, join a new sport, or simply find the next campus event, CampusPulse brings the heartbeat of UofT to your fingertips. Join us in transforming how students experience campus life, making it more accessible, engaging, and aligned with what truly matters to them.

What it does 🤔

For student users, CampusPulse has four main interfaces, each with its unique functionalities and usage.

The home page displays recent events, where the student can filter based on their specific interests.
The interactive map allows the student to visualize the activities going on around campus, where they can easily find the date and time for each event.
The intelligent calendar optimizes the student's schedule, integrating course timetables and informing the students of the activities occurring during their free time.
The conversational AI chatbot engages with the student, either verbally or via text, and provides personalized recommendations and answer any inquiries.

For club administrators, CampusPulse has an additional feature to upload events through inputting the time, location and other details.

How we built it 🔨

The backend is built using various Amazon Web Services. AWS Cognito is used for user authentication, with two user groups available, students and club administrators. AWS Transcribe and Translate are used to enable real-time verbal inputs for students. AWS Sage Maker, S3, Hugging Face, Langchain, LLAMA2, and RAG prompting are used for AI chatbot with event database. The frontend is built using HTML, Javascript, NextJS and tailwind CSS with visuals made using Figma.

Challenges we ran into 🧐

The development of CampusPulse was not without its challenges, particularly given our initial lack of extensive experience with Amazon Web Services (AWS), a cornerstone technology for hosting and managing the application. We recognized the steep learning curve we faced, necessitating a deep dive into AWS documentation, tutorials, and forums to quickly come up to speed with the platform's capabilities and best practices. In addition, we spent extensive amount of time integrating backend logic into our UI interface.

Accomplishments that we're proud of 😊

Our ability to learn and adeptly integrate AWS services into such a complex project in a short period is a significant point of pride. This experience has been incredibly rewarding, providing us with hands-on experience with cloud infrastructure and services that are pivotal in today's technology landscape. Moreover, this rapid learning and development process was fueled by our shared vision of creating a unified platform that bridges the gap between students and campus life. The successful integration of AWS services played a crucial role in bringing CampusPulse to life. It enabled us to offer a seamless, robust, and scalable solution that meets the dynamic needs of the University of Toronto's vibrant community.

What we learned 👓

The knowledge we acquired through integrating different AWS services and connecting backend logic with a dynamic frontend has been transformative. It extended beyond the technical realm, impacting our approach to problem-solving, collaboration, and project management. The hands-on experience with AWS has equipped us with a versatile set of skills that are highly relevant in today's technology-driven landscape, preparing us for future challenges and opportunities in cloud computing and web development.

What's next for CampusPulse 🗺️

Looking ahead, our vision for CampusPulse is not just to sustain its current offerings but to evolve it into an even more engaging and intuitive platform that stands at the forefront of enhancing student life at the University of Toronto. To achieve this, we wish to incorporate additional Amazon Web Services (AWS) functionalities, such as AWS Location Services and Amazon Personalize. By leveraging these services, CampusPulse will offer a more contextual and convenient way for students to engage with campus events and activities.

In addition, central to our future development efforts is the commitment to listening and responding to the student body's needs and suggestions. We plan to implement a robust feedback mechanism within CampusPulse, encouraging students to share their experiences, report issues, and suggest improvements. Beyond integrating new AWS services and refining our recommendation algorithms, we're dedicated to continuously improving the user experience and introducing new features. This includes optimizing the application's interface for ease of use, enhancing accessibility standards, and expanding the types of events and activities featured on the platform. We also envision creating more opportunities for student clubs and organizations to showcase their initiatives, thereby enriching the campus culture and fostering greater student engagement.