2015 Projects

Is your project missing? Edits? Corrections? Fork our repo.

GitMe (Won Best Visual/UX Design!)

Made by Viviana Yee, Kyle Holzinger, and Ivan Uvarov

A tool for analyzing your GitHub commits.

Outweigh Hemingway (Won Least Likely To Make Money!)

Made by Kaylie DeHart, Niousha Jafari, Emily Lane, and Alex Hersh.

Outweigh Hemingway is a Twitterbot that makes short stories by retweeting other twitter user’s tweets. Pulling together concepts from Natural Language Processing, OH attempts to create a common thread between strangers on the internet.

AYFS (Won Most Technically Challenging!)

Made by Pranav Gandhi

This is a distributed network filesystem that requires no local disk. All the files are on the tubes in between computers. Just drop the client on a bunch of machines in a datacenter and you’ll suddenly have lots of extra disk space since everything is hosted by the network.

Hot + Cold (Won Most Fun Idea!)###

Made by David Alelyunas, Daniel Cohen, Milo Davis, Jack Frysinger, Charlie Peters, and Zachary Reiter

All of us, at one point or another, have been using Google Maps or other navigation system, and have thought, “This is too easy. It tells me where to turn, and I know where I’m going. I need more of a challenge!” Well now, Hot+Cold can fix both of those problems. With Hot+Cold, all you do it pick a location category, the maximum distance you want to travel, and you’re off! The app will pick a destination that fits within your category, but won’t tell you what it is. Depending on which way you walk, you will receive feedback telling you whether you’re getting hotter or colder. The feedback takes the form of text that reloads often, so you know from minute to minute if you’re heading in the right direction. Additionally, the entire screen changes color from blue to red as you approach your destination. Upon reaching your destination, you will be notified, and will receive some information about the location so you know for sure you have arrived. Categories include restaurants, museums, historical sites, parks, and geocaches. You can select a distance up to ten miles away from your current location. Not only does this app defeat the ennui surrounding choosing a place to go, but it gives you a fun way to get there as well.

SnowPea Me (Won Most Innovative!)

GitHub Repository

Made by Alex Jolly, James Magnarelli, Anya Tran, and John Martin

Do you have a garden, do you know someone who has a garden? If so you’ve probably had an overflow of produce at some time that went to waste. What did you do? Eat it all by yourself? Foist it upon unwilling neighbors and former friends? Now there’s a better way What if you could find someone living near you who wanted to buy your extra produce from you? That’s what SnowPea Me is for. On SnowPea Me you can browse locally for available produce around you, grown by your neighbors in their own back yards. It’s a place where people who care deeply about organics, sustainability, or diet can come together with personal and community gardeners in a veggie symbiosis. If you find yourself with an abundance of kumquats, why not make some extra money by putting them up on SnowPea Me?

Pointr (Won Judge’s Choice Award!)

Made by Nikolai Wotton, Oscar Spencer, Michael Hu, and Kevin Luo

You’re walking in an unfamiliar area when a sudden bout of hunger strikes from out of the blue. With no restaurants in sight and no knowledge of the surrounding area…what are you to do?

Enter Pointr.

Pointr is a compass-like navigation application for Android wearables. Using Yelp Search API, Pointr locates several nearby eateries in the user’s vicinity and delegates arrows that each point to a vendor’s location. The restaurant that is most directly in front of the customer has information about its distance, Yelp rating, and reviews displayed.

Users are given the ability to focus on a specfic location that piques their interest, locking the focused location as the set destination.

Pointr aims not only to save people from dire situations, but to also encourage users to seek out new dining experiences. By offering users multiple easily accessible dining options, and plenty of informative Yelp reviews, users will find themselves trying out new places to eat more often while using this app on the go.

AttentionPassengers

Made by Andrew Knueven, Sanders Lauture, and Tevin Otieno

We made a text-based MBTA routing and alerts system! One can text the name of a station and their intended direction (inbound/outbound) to a Twilio number we have set up and receive back the next few departures for that station. It will also be possible to send two stations (start/destination) and receive the above information plus the time it will take to reach the destination. If there are transfers to other lines, the text will contain the estimated time to reach the transfer station and the next few departures within a certain time frame of that ETA. Finally, we are working on setting up pre-defined ‘favorites’ using Parse. Texting a single word (i.e. ‘work’) will send back a route that the user defines and assigns to that keyword. It will also be possible (maybe by demo time?) to set a time (for the work example, say, 8:15) and receive the route information/service alerts at that time every (week)day. The responses will be humorous, of course (i.e. delays will be accompanied by a picture of a train on fire). FYI - the above public Github repo is empty at the moment, we need to remove all our API keys before moving our code out of our private repo.

Badger Badger

(and here)

Made by Arya Boudaie, Sofiya Semenova, Jacob Regenstein, Kiana Khozein, and Seth Rait

BadgerBadger is the perfect app for any impulsive adventurer. Our users create a profile in which they select their categories of interests. BadgerBadger then creates a “quest” based on these interests and the user’s location. The user completes each quest by receiving badges when they visit each location in the quest. In map view, they can sort available quests by location and interest.

Bettor

Made by Arjun Balaji, Luke Van Seters, and Eric Yu

Bettor facilitates the exchange of currency based donations assigned for completing skill based tasks. It is written in the most ridiculous mobile app stack ever. Go on the back end as an API and AngularJS with CoffeeScript on the front end using Ionic webviews. In short, Bettor aims to disrupt the philanthropic markets.

Blurber

Made by Julia Ebert, Mustafa Çamurcu, and Shreyas Mahimkar

Amazon sells millions of different books, each of which comes with a blurb. We pulled together thousands of books from these vast depths and analyzed their contents, all to save you the trouble of having to read all those books (or even all those blurbs) yourself. We used Markov chains to generate predictions of what words will come next in a sequence. String these predictions together and you come up with something surprisingly coherent and usually humorous. A few of our personal favorite blurbs created by Blurber include: “Windows 8.1 For the White Girls” “A History of the US Military”, by Anne Frank “Drums of True Love, Drums of Winter” “… a budding relationship between the very gates of Venice and every variety of arranged marriage; Cassie is teeming with really expensive clothes.”

BuzzR

Made by Andrew Bass, Justin Kennedy, and Neal Merkl

BuzzR is an iOS application which aims to replace the pagers distributed at crowded restaurants and streamline the process of waiting for a table at any restaurant. It is geared towards both customers and restaurants. Customers will utilize BuzzR to quickly and conveniently reserve a spot on the wait-list and be notified when their table is ready. Restaurants will use a dashboard to efficiently manage the flow of people and save money from not having to replace/repair more pagers.

CertainT

Made by Tommy Hu and Pragathi Sanshi

How many times have you just gotten to the subway station and had to rush through the gates and down the stairs only to be left in the dust as the train roars away? What about unexpected delays you never saw coming from the fabulous weather we’ve been having recently? Fear no more! Our mobile app will detect your location, detect the closest subway station and tell you exactly how much time you have to make it to the next train in real time. Our target market consists of time-crunched T commuters who want to never feel the abandoning feeling of a just-missed train or want to minimize waiting time at the station.

Co-Pilot

Made by Tom Hay, Jackie Ali, Benji Smith, and Durward Benham

Have you ever found yourself in a conversation and not known what to say? Do you send screenshots of texts to your friends in a desperate plea for advice? Our app is for you! Co-pilot is an Android app which allows you to discreetly receive advice from a friend to help you in difficult texting situations. On one simple screen you can see your friends advice and your conversation, while giving updates to your friend in real time. From giving bad news to flirting with the object of your affection, co-pilot will get you through it.

Dolfin

Made by Nathan Goodman, Jesse Oberstien, and Kate Hutchinson

Dolfin is a casual learning application. It allows lazy people to learn awesome things sparing hardly any time and absolutely no money. If you wanna see our whole spiel, please visit our About page.

Fib

Made by Anne Catherine Feldman, Vijay Pemmaraju, Jake Bernstein, and James Yanyuk

Fib is an interpersonal trivia mobile game that puts your friendships to the test. It provides a fast, fun way to satisfy both peoples’ fascination with talking about themselves and their nosiness about their friends.The app allows users to connect with their Facebook friends with a mobile version of two truths and a lie, whereby users provide two true statements and one lie about themselves and challenge others to pick the fib.

FrankenPokemon

GitHub Repo

Made by Anthony Chan, Cosimo Leone, Anh Bui, Ana Cunha, and Sarah Laplante

Create new exciting and/or horrifying pokémon!!

FriendCast

Made by Danny Wolf, Chris Gullo, and Lili Dumoulin

FriendCast is an application which stands as a beacon of hope for the crippling social dilemma that plagues modern society: wanting to hang out with people but not enough to put in the effort of seeking them out directly. By authenticating through Facebook, a person can make plans without the hassle of actually having to make plans. At the touch of a button, the user can view all their equally bored and available friends, and subsequently enjoy the social interaction they crave without having to subjugate themselves to the shame of text-spamming everyone in their contacts. The more bored friends join, the more other bored people can contact them, and the less bored they all become. FriendCast is, in its essence, inbound marketing for friends.

FreeBSD Telnet Remote Root Exploit

Made by Michael Coppola

Remotely exploits a pre-auth buffer overflow vulnerability in an old version of telnetd on FreeBSD, resulting in root access.

Jamr

Made by Sean Luo, Ryan Fischler, Tommy Nguyen, Arif Topcu, Calvin Mei, and Ben Vachon

Jamr is the that enhances a musician’s ability to collaborate. Users can swipe right to connect or left to pass after hearing a sample of other users’ music to indicate whether they have an interest in making some music. Jamr strives to build back musical communities from the past. Even better is that when two users who have liked each other also have a mutually liked user, Jamr will suggest a group “Jam” between those people. This goes on for larger groups as well! Come and join the revolution!

Mamma’s Boy

Made by Daniel Moreh, and Dick Fickling

Daniel misses his momma. We turned a Raspberry Pi into a web-enabled alarm clock so Daniel’s momma can leave him voice messages to wake up to. Other people can leave messages, too.

MEVA

Made by James Grammatikos

Metabolite profiling is a biological technique that involves quantifying the concentrations of metabolites (byproducts of metabolism in the body, eg sugars and amino acids). In the past, analysis was done by looking at individual metabolites and examining the effects of disease on those concentrations. My past research at the Broad Institute involved examining effects of disease on metabolic pathways, groups of predefined metabolic interaction. These pathways form networks with metabolites as nodes and chemical reactions as edges. My current goal is to develop an algorithm and visualization that analyzes interactions BETWEEN pathways, to aid in exploratory research.

PlayThis

Made by Amit Patel and Lynn Samson

PlayThis is essentially a DJ application that lets anyone vote for their favorite songs to be played next by the application. The song with the most votes gets played the soonest. This application is perfect for parties and social events where guests can easily give their input as to what should be played next!

Screwd

Made by Brett Krutiansky and Jacob Brandt

It has a list of many phobias, and give your current location it will show you nearby pings off google that have to do with those phobias. It is to show truly scary the world we live in is. And that our world is about finding all the happiness through the bleak and dreary.

Sentipede

Made by Pedro Henrique Ribeiro Morais Silva, and Zaid Khan

We’ve developed an algorithm that correlates stock prices and ‘happy tweets’. Using an online interface for Natural Language Processing, we focused on the sentiment analysis of tweets for certain companies on certain days. After determining the positivity of the tweets, we use the score and the data mined from the stock information to correlate the stocks’ prices to tweets. Our target market spans from academic research on economic behaviour to the average twitter user curious about the effect of their tweets.

Splice - Let’s cure together

Made by Ronak Lotia, Vishal Gori, and Siddharth Jasani

This website is like a stackoverflow for doctors but in a more controlled environment. Here, doctors can choose to post amongst themselves and also share their issues and comments with biotechnology or similar other engineering departments if required. This is basically an idea with a purpose of generating more ideas merging the Medical and Technical domains. Additionally, a controlled environment for Doctors enables them to post their queries within their particular domain of interest, with like minded people. Doctors can choose to post a question to the people from different domains for them to be able to provide efficient solutions to their current technology related issues. People from domains other than medical cannot post. They can only comment on already existing posts. Doctors can vote up or vote down comments or posts from all domains. People from other domains can only vote up or vote down on comments posted by people from same domain. This configuration ensures that the focus is kept on resolving medical issues and not anything else. General users can upload data directly to the website using wearable devices mentioning about their illness in a separate section. This huge amount of data is vital for doctors to perform research and resolve the issue of lack of subject data significantly. Furthermore, doctors from different countries can share different methods or techniques. For example, using wearable devices like Google Glass, they can share a way of performing an operation with doctors from different parts of the world and share and enhance knowledge using that. Now, such information cannot be distributed to regular people hence the segregation. Future scope of this website can only be limited by imagination, however from a developers perspective we would think about integrating Regulatory facilities and Patent services as a separate section.

Third Space

Made by Justin Marple and Marc Alexander Rudkowski

We bring virtual reality right to your mobile device for nearly no cost. Not only is it Android and iOS compatible, it offers a full, immersive experience of virtual reality. This brings you into a virtual game world and tracks your motion and direction to map your spacial awareness This can solve so many problems. The first is easy gamification in virtual reality to teach and reward. This also can be used to bring an immersive meeting experience to distributed teams. Real estate has the ability to have fully immersive tours without having a potential client leaving their home. And this is all done with just a mobile phone.

Tulip

Made by Corey Campbell

Mainstream sit-downs should cater better to vegetarians, an untapped and growing market. Tulip is improving the understanding between restaurants and individuals who seek a more savvy dining experience. Pick Tulip.

UrNEU

Made by John Williams, Tiffney Kitiratanasumpun, and Wendy Schiller

UrNEU is a Chrome extension that displays myNEU content in a more visually-appealing and user-friendly way. It provides easy access to student information on academics, finances, co-op, and campus life all on a single page with search functionality.

Watch My Stuff

Made by Matthew Coleman, Raymond O’Connor, Brian Cox, Eduardo Fungairino, and Pavel Potapov

So your in the library all set up and comfortable, when you have to use the bathroom/get food/walk the dog. BUT you don’t want to pack up all your stuff OR loose your spot OR get everything stolen. Use our app and someone will come and hold your spot down until you get back. If you’re hanging around a library and want to make some extra money or help people out, power up our app and hold people’s spots for them!

YummyTummy

Made by Darryl Johnson, Santiago Beltran, Anna Goncharova, and Carlos Cheung

Using the data from the current BU Food App, which allows our fellow Boston University students to see what’s available in the dining halls and keep track of what they eat for nutrition, we figured that the amount of choices available in the dining halls and the data we’re collecting could be used to build a food recommendation engine to enhance the user experience. By recommending personally tailored items, the YummyTummy engine not only recognizes what users eat, but when they eat it, how often, and what tastes they most enjoy. The data is then used to recommend the most delicious dish for that user based on any menu they pick.


Follow the nice people at @hackbeanpot for more updates about HackBeanpot!