## Inspiration

I like web design, I like 90's web design, and I like 90's tech. So it all came together very naturally.

## What it does

nineties.tech is a love letter to the silly, chunky, and experimental technology of the 90s. There's a Brian Eno quote about how we end up cherishing the annoyances of "outdated" tech: *Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature.* I think this attitude persists today, and making a website in 90s web design style helped me put myself in the shoes of web designers from 30 years ago (albeit, with flexbox!)

## How we built it

Built with Sveltekit, pure CSS and HTML, deployed with Cloudflare, domain name from get.tech.

## Challenges we ran into

First time using Cloudflare. I repeatedly tried to deploy a non-working branch and was close to tears. Then I exited out to the Deployments page and realized that the fix I'd thrown into the config file actually worked.

## Accomplishments that we're proud of

Grinded out this website in the span of a few hours; came up with a cool domain name; first time deploying a website through Cloudflare; first time using Svelte.

## What we learned

My friend Ivan helped me through the process of starting off with Svelte and serving sites through Cloudflare. This will be used for further nefarious and well-intentioned purposes in the future.

## What's next for nineties.tech

User submissions? Longer, better-written out entries? Branch the site out into several different pages instead of putting everything into one page? Adding a classic 90's style navigation sidebar? Many ideas...
## Inspiration

Since the arrival of text messaging into the modern day world, users have had a love hate relationship with this novel form of communication. Instant contact with those you love at the cost of losing an entire facet of conversation - emotion. However, one group of individuals has been affected by this more than most. For those with autism, who already have a difficult time navigating emotional cues in person, the world of text messages is an even more challenging situation. That's where NOVI comes in.

## What it does

NOVI utilizes Natural Language Processing to identify a range of emotions within text messages from user to user. Then, by using visual and text cues and an intuitive UI/UX design, it informs the user (based on their learning preferences) of what emotions can be found in the texts they are receiving. NOVI is a fully functional app with a back-end utilizing machine learning and a heavily researched front end to cater to our demographic and help them as much as possible.

## How I built it

Through the use of react native, CSS, javascript, Google Cloud and plenty of hours, NOVI was born. We focused on a back end implementation with a weight on machine learning and natural language processing and a front end focus on research based intuition that could maximize the effectiveness of our app for our users. We ended up with a brand new fully functional messaging app that caters to our demographic's exact needs.

## Challenges I ran into

As this was many of our first times touching anything related to machine learning, there was no real intuition behind a lot of the things we tried to implement. This meant a lot of learning potential and many hours poured into developing new skills. By the end of it however we ended up learning a lot about not only new topics, but also the process of discovering new information and content in order to create our own products.

## Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Something we put a genuinely large amount of effort into was researching our target demographic. As every member in our group had very individual experiences with someone with autism, there were a lot of assumptions we had to avoid making. We avoided these generalizations by looking into as many research papers backing our theories as we could find. This was the extra step we chose to take to assure a genuinely effective UI/UX for our users.

## What I learned

We learned how to use react native, how to use a backend and among many other things, simply how to learn new things. We learned how to research to maximize effectiveness of interfaces and experiences and we learned how to make an app with a specific user base.

## What's next for NOVI

NOVI is an app with much to offer and a lot of potential for collaboration with a variety of organizations and other companies. It is also possible to adapt the concept of NOVI to adapt to other areas of aid for other possible demographics, such as for those with Asperger's.
## Inspiration

There's something about brief glints in the past that just stop you in your tracks: you dip down, pick up an old DVD of a movie while you're packing, and you're suddenly brought back to the innocent and carefree joy of when you were a kid. It's like comfort food.

So why not leverage this to make money? The ethos of nostalgic elements from everyone's favourite childhood relics turns heads. Nostalgic feelings have been repeatedly found in studies to increase consumer willingness to spend money, boosting brand exposure, conversion, and profit.

## What it does

Large Language Marketing (LLM) is a SaaS built for businesses looking to revamp their digital presence through "throwback"-themed product advertisements.

Tinder x Mean Girls? The Barbie Movie? Adobe x Bob Ross? Apple x Sesame Street? That could be your brand, too. Here's how:

1. You input a product description and target demographic to begin a profile
2. LLM uses the data with the Co:here API to generate a throwback theme and corresponding image descriptions of marketing posts
3. OpenAI prompt engineering generates a more detailed image generation prompt featuring motifs and composition elements
4. DALL-E 3 is fed the finalized image generation prompt and marketing campaign to generate a series of visual social media advertisements
5. The Co:here API generates captions for each advertisement
6. You're taken to a simplistic interface where you can directly view, edit, generate new components for, and publish each social media post, all in one!
7. You publish directly to your business's social media accounts to kick off a new campaign 🥳

## How we built it

* **Frontend**: React, TypeScript, Vite
* **Backend**: Python, Flask, PostgreSQL
* **APIs/services**: OpenAI, DALL-E 3, Co:here, Instagram Graph API
* **Design**: Figma

## Challenges we ran into

* **Prompt engineering**: tuning prompts to get our desired outputs was very, very difficult, where fixing one issue would open up another in a fine game of balance to maximize utility
* **CORS hell**: needing to serve externally-sourced images back and forth between frontend and backend meant fighting a battle with the browser -- we ended up writing a proxy
* **API integration**: with a lot of technologies being incorporated over our frontend, backend, database, data pipeline, and AI services, massive overhead was introduced into getting everything set up and running on everyone's devices -- npm versions, virtual environments, PostgreSQL, the Instagram Graph API (*especially*)...
* **Rate-limiting**: the number of calls we wanted to make versus the number of calls we were allowed was a small tragedy

## Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're really, really proud of integrating a lot of different technologies together in a fully functioning, cohesive manner! This project involved a genuinely technology-rich stack that allowed each one of us to pick up entirely new skills in web app development.

## What we learned

Our team was uniquely well-balanced in that every one of us ended up being able to partake in everything, especially things we hadn't done before, including:

1. DALL-E
2. OpenAI API
3. Co:here API
4. Integrating AI data pipelines into a web app
5. Using PostgreSQL with Flask
6. For our non-frontend-enthusiasts, atomic design and state-heavy UI creation :)
7. Auth0

## What's next for Large Language Marketing

* Optimizing the runtime of image/prompt generation
* Text-to-video output
* Abstraction allowing any user log in to make Instagram Posts
* More social media integration (YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter, and WeChat support)
* AI-generated timelines for long-lasting campaigns
* AI-based partnership/collaboration suggestions and contact-finding
* UX revamp for collaboration
* Option to add original content alongside AI-generated content in our interface