Megafind CalHacks 4.0

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Megafind is a webapp that allows professors to have live lecture sessions. Megafind also provides an engaging,immersive learning experience for students.

Awards won:

  • 1st Place Overall out of 2200+ people (world's largest collegiate hackathon)
  • Best Education Hack

    • Demo Steps

  • Professor logs in
  • Professor passes in a Google Slides presentation
  • Professor presses start lecture
  • Student gets the powerpoint parsed on their end and starts seeing the live transcription with key entities highlighted
  • Teacher presses stop lecture
  • A digest gets sent to the student with a summary of the lecture, key words and definitions, and the notes the student took
    • Github Repo

    Key Features

    This project was really big, so I'll outline some of the main functionalities:

    • Portal: Login for Professors. Professors could start and stop lectures
    • Transcription : Real time speech to text transcription of what the Professor is saying in class that all students in the class can view.
    • Phrase Analysis: Entity Analysis for the phrases before they are transcribed. Articles that are relevant are found and then the phrase becomes a hyperlink in the transcript.
    • Assisted Note taking: Professors can pass in a google slides file and the text is written onto an edittable text file. This makes it so students do not have to rush to write the bullet points on a slide and can instead focus on clarifications.
    • The Digest: At the end of each lecture session, a digest is composed of 3 main parts, a summary of the transcription of the lecture, the notes that the student wrote in the notes tab, and the important phrases along with a 2 sentence summary for each one. This makes it optimal for studying before a test or just review in general.

    How does Megafind work?

    This project was fairly massive (for a hackathon) in terms of the amount of features it had and the time it was built in. To get the initial set up, we had to get an idea of what we wanted to do. We started set up by getting a hold of the Google Speech to Text API and a summarizer API from Intellexer.

    We then used the Google Natural Language API to create an Entity Extractor that would find relevant phrases in our text during the real time transcription process. Following this, we used the Google Search API to find a link for all the relevant phrases. The relevant phrases would then be turned into hyperlinks when being transcribed.

    Using the Slides API from Google, we were able to parse the provided powerpoint from teachers and write it into an edittable text tab.

    To create our digest that is sent to the students at the end of the lecture session, we gathered the following data:

    • A summary of the transcript
    • Notes that the student wrote during the live lecture
    • The key words and a short 2 sentence summary about them
    We then wrote this data into a textfile and sent it. We gathered the summary by using the Intellexer API, the lecture notes were gathered from the notes file, and the key words were also go from storage; however, we had to use the Google search API to find 2 sentences about them. We stored the data about which students to email through Mlab and we actually sent the email by using the Sparkpost API.

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