Educatus

Dashboard
Text Analyzer
Analogy Generator
Compare Country
Reword Sentence
Dashboard Functionality

Inspiration

A need for a centralized, customizable hub of AI-based tools that can address various problems like education, health and well-being, and societal inequalities.

What it does

Educatus is a customizable AI Dashboard of up to 6 different AI/Data exploration tools that allow a user to analyze many bodies of text efficiently and features various other functionalities. Educatus features the following 6 tools:

Reword Sentence: Reconstruct sentences using simpler vocabulary for non-technical audiences or create grammatically more complex sentence structures. This tool helps reduce inequalities.
Text Analyzer: The text analyzer is an important tool for academic research, as it can help to identify and define the most important topics within a text using unique highlighting and create Wikipedia blurbs This tool helps address quality education
Analogy Generator: Given a topic and a piece of text, the analogy generator attempts to explain the topic's relationship using an analogy based on a target text. This tool helps address quality education
Guided Notes: Generate a PDF file of text input with various entities replaced with fill-in-the-blanks, allowing a person to practice various text-based content for study purposes. This tool helps address quality education
Compare Country: Use data from the Global Economy database to compare over 200 countries in terms of their Happiness Index, GDP, and Cost of Living Index, among 300+ other metrics. This tool helps address health and well-being
QA Generation: Generate Question/Answer pairs from bodies of text then selectively generate a quiz using the content to test your knowledge. This tool helps address quality education

How we built it

Educatus is made up of two separate microservices. A Next.js Web application frontend that features the actual UI dashboard functionality and login authentication (using Google Firebase), and another FastAPI backend service that services API routes for each tool functionality that can be called by the frontend service. The tools used OpenAI for open-ended language tasks, a large pretrained transformer for Question Generation, and spaCy for lower level language tasks, like entity and part of speech detection.

Challenges we ran into

For Educatus, we focused heavily on creating tools that provide utility for the user. The primary challenge was in brainstorming efficient and feasible approaches that we can implement into the backend. This includes choosing the appropriate AI models for different natural language processing tasks and designing algorithms for processing the text. For some of the tasks, our initial approaches worked well. However, for some others, our initial approaches to certain tasks proved infeasible, inefficient, and complex given the hackathon’s timeframe. To overcome this challenge, we engineered workarounds that generated appropriate results.

Our secondary challenge was version control and ensuring the project functioned the same on all our machines. QA Generation and Note Generation functioned on some of our group members machines, but not others. A project of this scope required extensive coordination and it was crucial for our workflow to avoid merge conflicts and integration errors.

We also had someones computer die towards the end (literally!)

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of creating a versatile application that can use AI to address multiple important issues and empowers the user to learn and discover the power of AI. Additionally we go to combine Computer Engineering, Computer Science, and Statistics students to utilize various statistical models through an intuitive UI that features real world utility.

What we learned

During the course of 24 hours we got to learn how to efficiently manage a team of 5 people working on 5 different tasks, learnt a lot of great new web development technologies, and learnt key principles of how to setup different microservices that communicate with eachother