## Inspiration

There are many social network portfolios out there—LinkedIn, Behance, GitHub—but they all treat the portfolio as an afterthought. These platforms have become cluttered and it is easy to get lost in all the other functionality.
We wanted to focus on what matters: the projects. That is why we set up **Showfolio**, with care put into every UX decision.

## What it does

Showfolio is focused on content first. Every project listed on the website follows the *Problem → Solution → Implementation → Outcome* model, which ensures that users consistently share their approach and thought process behind their work, not just the final result.

Each user has their own personal page that lists all of the work they've chosen to share, including a featured project. It's branded to look like it could be your own personal website, yet it remains professional.

The product is targeted at students who are looking to do project work—in programming, design, business, or *anything*. They can share their profile URL with friends and future employers.

## How we built it

We first decided on what tools we wanted to learn for the project. We settled on TypeScript and React as frameworks we wanted to improve. After we knew we were doing a web app, we went to work on the design. We spent the first few hours chatting, relaxed as we started the hackathon a few hours late. The first day was mainly UX and design - thinking how every decision would influence the user of our platform. The second day lasted nearly 24 hours, as it was now crunch time. This is when the back end was forged using ts-Node (Node.js with TypeScript) and the css was stylized (using modular sass).

## Challenges we ran into

Work is never done, and knowing the scope of a project is essential. We had a bit of scope creep as we weren't originally planning on doing a backend. However, with the amount of dynamic content - full paragraphs and images - it didn't make sense to stay with a static site. Fortunately, the backend for this website only took a couple hours. The choice was made to hold all data in system files instead of a structural database. This saved a lot of time that could have been spent setting up tables. However, we still ran into some annoyances connecting the frontend to the backend that costed us some time.

In addition, design has no right answer. We weren't 100% confident about a couple of design choices, such as how to scale from desktop to mobile for the projects page, but with time against you eventually one has to make a decision.

## Accomplishments that we're proud of

For 36 hours, it's functional and looks great.

## What we learned

Start small. Build out an MVP. It'll take much longer than anticipated. But once you've got something stable and clean-looking, that's when the fun begins.

## What's next for Showfolio

This project started as a hackathon idea but we can see it becoming a popular portfolio site for students (or at least ourselves).
## Inspiration

The volume of academic literature is exploding. In machine learning alone, the number of papers on arXiv doubles every 24 months. As former research interns, we've experienced firsthand the overwhelming challenge of sifting through hundreds of dense, complex papers to find relevant information. This process is not just time-consuming; it's a significant bottleneck in the research workflow, particularly in fast-moving fields like machine learning. We realized that the tools researchers use to navigate this sea of information haven't kept pace with the exponential growth of published research.

## What it does

Scholar-Link is a groundbreaking tool that revolutionizes how researchers interact with scientific literature. At its core, it creates a visual force-directed graph of research papers, leveraging the principles of co-citation and bibliographic coupling to reveal hidden connections and trends.

### Key features include:

* **Interactive Visual Graph**: Papers are represented as nodes, with connections based on co-citation (papers cited together) and bibliographic coupling (papers sharing references). This allows researchers to visually explore the landscape of their field, finding inspiration or papers they might otherwise miss
* **Trend Analysis**: Keyword and time/activity analysis in a graphical representation allows researchers to easily spot emerging trends and hot topics in their field.
* **AI-Powered Insights**: Our specialized AI Chatbot can quickly skim through papers, providing concise summaries of key points, methodologies, and findings
* **Customizable Filters**: Researchers can filter the graph based on various parameters like publication date, citation count, or specific keywords.

## How we built it

We built Scholar-Link using a combination of cutting-edge technologies and novel applications of established bibliometric principles:

* **Natural Language Processing**: We implemented advanced NLP algorithms to analyze paper content, extract key information, and generate summaries.
* **Graph Theory**: We applied complex graph algorithms to create and optimize the force-directed graph based on co-citation and bibliographic coupling data.
* **Front-end Development:** We created an intuitive, responsive user interface using modern web technologies to ensure a smooth user experience.
* **Back-end Infrastructure**: We built a scalable backend to handle large volumes of data and real-time graph computations, leveraging concurrency and multithreading to boost performance
* **Data Collection**: We developed robust web scraping tools to gather paper metadata from various academic databases and repositories.

## Challenges we ran into

* **Data Volume**: Handling and processing the sheer volume of academic papers was a significant challenge. A lot of time and effort was spent figuring out multithreading to optimize processing
* **Graph Optimization**: Ensuring the graph produced correct results, even with massive amounts of nodes, required complex optimization algorithms
* **AI Accuracy**: Implementing an AI summarizer that could accurately capture the essence of complex academic papers across various fields was particularly challenging.

## What we learned

This project deepened our understanding of bibliometrics, graph theory, and natural language processing. We also gained invaluable insights into the needs and pain points of researchers across various disciplines.

## What's next for Scholar-Link

We're excited about the potential of Scholar-Link to transform academic research.

Our next steps include:

* Expanding our database to cover more academic fields and publications.
* Further optimizing our algorithms to analyze larger datasets and deliver more comprehensive results
* Incorporating machine learning to provide personalized paper recommendations.
* Developing collaboration features to allow researchers to share and annotate graphs.
* Creating APIs to integrate our tool with existing research management software.
* Exploring applications in other knowledge-intensive fields beyond academia, such as patent analysis or market research.

Scholar-Link is more than just a tool; it's a new way of seeing and understanding the vast landscape of human knowledge. We're committed to continually improving and expanding our platform to meet the evolving needs of researchers worldwide.
## Inspiration

We wanted to watch videos together as a social activity during the pandemic but were unable as many platforms were hard to use or unstable. Therefore our team decided to create a platform that met our needs in terms of usability and functionality.

## What it does

Bubbles allow people to create viewing rooms and invite their rooms to watch synchronized videos. Viewers no longer have to conduct countdowns on their play buttons or have a separate chat while watching!

## How I built it

Our web app uses React for the frontend and interfaces with our Node.js REST API in the backend. The core of our app uses the Solace PubSub+ and the MQTT protocol to coordinate events such as video play/pause, a new member joining your bubble, and instant text messaging. Users broadcast events with the topic being their bubble room code, so only other people in the same room receive these events.

## Challenges I ran into

* Collaborating in a remote environment: we were in a discord call for the whole weekend, using Miro for whiteboarding, etc.
* Our teammates came from various technical backgrounds, and we all had a chance to learn a lot about the technologies we used and how to build a web app
* The project was so much fun we forgot to sleep and hacking was more difficult the next day

## Accomplishments that I'm proud of

The majority of our team was inexperienced in the technologies used. Our team is very proud that our product was challenging and was completed by the end of the hackathon.

## What I learned

We learned how to build a web app ground up, beginning with the design in Figma to the final deployment to GitHub and Heroku. We learned about React component lifecycle, asynchronous operation, React routers with a NodeJS backend, and how to interface all of this with a Solace PubSub+ Event Broker. But also, we learned how to collaborate and be productive together while still having a blast

## What's next for Bubbles

We will develop additional features regarding Bubbles. This includes seek syncing, user join messages and custom privilege for individuals.