LivreAbroad

Do you miss travelling and exploring new places? Discover your next destination!

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📖✈️Inspiration

The past year and a half our team has been quarantined in our homes, dreaming about the day in which we would get to travel the world and explore. We made the most of our new lives by studying, working, starting new workout routines, cooking and of course watching ALOT of TikTok.

Believe it or not though, when all those things got too boring, we actually picked up a book and read. In fact, according to Global English Editing worldwide we've seen a 35% of individuals reading more during the pandemic.

So our team wanted to find a way to capitalize on both the incoming travel industry boom and the recent upward trends in reading. Something we can do by helping our users pick the perfect next travel destination based on their recent reading list.

Not only will this push individuals to travel to new places, but it can help remove the stress and anxiety around choosing a travel destination. With the world's most popular destinations likely to rise in price and congestion, new suggestions will be ever so important.

So join the movement, and livre abroad!

🏗️What it does

LivreAbroad is a web platform that allows users to record a list of books and receive a personalized list of the top travel destinations for them based on their reading. Not only will users receive amazing travel recommendations but our application will auto populate an Pinterest board with pictures of the locations we recommend for them to visit.

🔨 How we built it

  • Frontend: built in React using Material UI and deployed on Microsoft Cloud Services (Azure)
  • Backend: Python backend
  • Database: CockroachDB
  • API:Hootsuite API
  • Machine Learning: Tensorflow
  • Branding and Design: Figma

LivreAbroad is integrated with the Hootsuite API to take advantage of its unique and easy-to-use features to make our application seamless and fully integrated into our user's life by connecting to their social media accounts. After our application makes a recommendation it adds a picture of our location to a unique Pinterest board automatically. This way the user can see all the places they are recommended. We can further expand our integrations with Hootsuite by sending Facebook messages to friends of the user to invite them on these trips. As you can see on the Hootsuite dashboard our application has scheduled to post these travel locations to my Pinterest Board.

LivreAbroad uses NLTK’s natural language processing library as well as Tensorflow Machine Learning to generate travel destinations based on your recent reads. We used CockroachDB to store each user’s books, as well as our list of cities mapped to adjectives and genres that match that city. Storing the genres and cities with CockroachDB made it really easy to get a list of city recommendations based on the genres of the books inputted. And we stored the cities in Cockroach along with their adjectives so that we could use our Machine Learning Algorithm to determine genres for cities without them.

🚫 Challenges we ran into

  • working with the Hootsuite API to post images on Pinterest
  • building out the logic for location recommendation modelling
  • scraping book information

🏆Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • the way we work together, and the fun we had as a team
  • creating a working product that we might even use ourselves

🧠 What we learned

  • Sleep and balance is important
  • To check university class deadlines prior to the weekend

🔮What's next for LivreAbroad

It's in your hands! Next time you're looking for a new travel location, try LivreAbroad and see what amazing adventures will sprout from our recommendations.

With that in mind, we'd love to build in the ability for users to input the places they have travelled and then producing recommendations of books they can read. Pictures of these books would also be automatically posted to a Pinterest Board as well for the user. We would also provide them with links to the GoodReads summary and can also be integrated with Pinterest's API and Goodreads API. We also can further use Hootsuite to message friends about their travel plans and invite them to facilitate groups trips.

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