Convergent’s First Side Project Expo
Our career fair comes with a swarm of unproven students, nervous, not knowing what to expect. Each brings along a resume they had crafted especially for the event. These resumes may include great leadership examples and side projects, but, left and right, these bright-eyed freshmen are turned away— “We’re looking for juniors and seniors”, “Come back next year when you have a bit more experience”. If only these companies had a way of seeing just what they were capable of.
At Convergent, many of our officers lived this scenario firsthand. Looking to solve this problem for our community, we decided to host our first side project expo the week after our spring career fair.
Specifically, the Side Project Expo was designed as a networking event to give top UT students the opportunity to show off their side projects to company recruiters and engineers.
The Expo
Leading up to the event, we sent out a side project application on our university-wide mailing list and in a number of Facebook groups. The process was competitive; in the end, we accepted projects from 27 students.
We hosted students who had recreated Apple’s laptop-phone handoff mechanism, an app that replaces TV commercials with content you’d rather view, an app that conveniently lists all the available free food opportunities on campus, a cryptocurrency trader, and more.
At the end of the event, we allowed all attendees to vote on their favorite projects. Our three winners are BlinkLink, Uplift: Positive Psychology, and Crowdsourced Cartographic Catastrophe Analysis (CCCA).
Winners
BlinkLink
Contributors: Roldan Moreno, Robert Clendenin, Keven Li, Chia Hua Lu
In recent years, with the removal of the headphone jack from most flagship smartphones, customers have been forced to move to wireless headphones and speakers or risk dealing with the dongle. Despite promises from major tech companies on Bluetooth improvements and better QoL use, it’s still a pain to switch pairing from one device to another. Our goal was to create something that enabled users to stop manually switching headphone pairing, and allow them to transition seamlessly. Our application runs primarily in the background, keeping track of audio output states on MacBooks, in order to facilitate automatic handoff. When the user closes YouTube on MacBook A, and open Spotify on MacBook B, their headset or speaker will unpair from A and pair to B without any user input.
It is implemented as a macOS daemon utilizing Python libraries & AppleScript to check for system audio playback with logic to switch between devices with active audio playback. The team built a mySQL database and a Java servlet in order to communicate between devices and handle device switching priority with a Bluetooth audio device.
Uplift: Positive Psychology
Contributor: Shiva Velingker
Uplift is a data-driven mental health app that Shiva is developing with help from the Dell Medical School. It allows users to journal within an app and then analyzes their entries to determine major themes and ideas occurring in their lives. These analytics are then used to generate personal insights to promote growth. For example, it helps succinctly show not only which themes are prevalent in one’s life but also how these different themes are dynamically interacting with each other. The overall goal of the app is to bring underlying ideas and emotions to the forefront of one’s awareness and then motivate an individual to proactively transform their lives. The app is still a work in progress but has all the foundation setup.
Crowdsourced Cartographic Catastrophe Analysis (CCCA)
Contributors: Aafia Ahmad, Alexandra Bellon, Nathan Huckleberry
Crowdsourced Cartographic Catastrophe Analysis (CCCA) is a powerful tool for social good that leverages real-time data from social media. It uses the frequency of tweets with location enabled and keywords relevant to natural disasters to form a heatmap from which first responders and helpers can decide which areas are most in need of assistance.
Honorable Mentions
University Food Finder
University Food Finder is a website that lists all events that have free food, sorted by date, happening on the user’s college campus. The platform utilizes ten web-scrapers to periodically scratch event data from departments and student organizations on campus, resulting in our massive database of almost 1,000 events total (and that’s just for the next month!). It uses basic natural language processing to determine which events have free food (almost 300).
Jive
Jive is the ultimate party and roadtrip music app. Users of the app join a local party hosted by another user of the app and can add songs to a shared playlist that is played via the party host’s phone. This democratizes the process of constructing playlists of music to be played gatherings, parties, roadtrips, and study sessions. Jive utilizes Spotify to stream music to the app directly and allows users to query for songs in the Spotify database to add to the playlist. Jive parties are localized and can only be joined by members when in range of the host’s phone. Jive is programmed with React Native and is both iOS and Android compatible
NanoFlick
Video is important. We spend hours of our day watching it. Unlike other forms of entertainment, such as photos and memes, people have trouble making good videos quickly. NanoFlick aims to fix this problem by templatizing video production, making it so that the user needs to follow a set of simple directions to shoot their video. Besides the shooting, no input is needed — the user can share to whatever service they wish in one click.
TV Commercials Suck:
A software project that detects and blocks TV commercials during sports broadcasting in real time. The device is plug-and-play, and it sits in-between your TV and your video source. It utilizes a deep convolutional neural network on the android platform.
Desk — Homework Solving Sandbox
Desk allows its users to spend more time on things that matter and less time on the things that don’t when it come to solving their math- and engineering-related homework problems. Users take notes on the virtual sheets of paper, turning any math into a solvable equation just by circling it. When it come time to turn their work in, they easily export their pages as a PDF and submit it to their class.
About Texas Convergent
Texas Convergent is a UT student organization centered around technology, business, and design. Our goal is to promote collaboration across people of all backgrounds through entrepreneurship, and be a platform for students to bring their ideas to life.
We had a great time hosting this event, and can’t wait to host another this fall! If you are a company representative interested in sponsoring us and attending our next expo, contact our partnerships associate, Michail Shaposhnikov, at partnerships@txconvergent.org.
