campus-pulse

Inspiration

The inspiration for Campus Pulse stemmed from the challenges students face in staying informed about events happening on campus. Whether it’s academic talks, career fairs, or social gatherings, the lack of an intuitive platform for discovering relevant events often leaves students missing out on opportunities. We envisioned a tool that combines advanced search capabilities with an easy-to-use interface, helping students discover events tailored to their interests.

What it does

Campus Pulse is an intelligent platform that connects students to events that matter to them. With simple text queries like "AI workshops" or "career fair," users can:

Discover events using semantic search, ensuring relevant results even if exact terms don’t match.
Filter results by departments or categories (e.g., Engineering, Arts, Sports).
Access event details such as title, date, time, location, and tags, all displayed in a user-friendly format.

The platform leverages advanced machine learning models to deliver precise and meaningful search results, empowering students to make the most of their campus experience.

How we built it

Backend:

Utilized AWS Lambda for serverless execution, ensuring scalability and cost-efficiency.
Leveraged DynamoDB for event storage, offering a reliable and fast NoSQL database solution.
Integrated a pre-trained SBERT (Sentence-BERT) semantic search model via AWS SageMaker, enabling robust natural language processing capabilities.

Frontend:

Designed a lightweight web interface using React.js for seamless interaction.
Connected the frontend to AWS using API Gateway, ensuring secure and efficient communication with the backend.

Deployment:

Hosted the frontend on AWS Amplify.
Managed infrastructure using AWS services like CloudFormation and IAM for security.

Challenges we ran into

Integrating Semantic Search: Deploying the pre-trained SBERT model on AWS SageMaker and configuring it to handle real-time queries required fine-tuning and a steep learning curve.

Handling CORS Issues: Setting up CORS policies correctly for API Gateway to enable frontend-backend communication was time-consuming and tricky.