Partner: Agora Neos

Simerjit Chahil

Rovin Yu

Sarad Basnet

Uyen Dinh

Project Overview:  Agora Neos plans to connect cities with their communities by offering a platform where citizens can help crowdfund their cities projects under a collective municipal bond. This is a problem currently, as the current municipal bond system is favored toward institutional investors and registered brokers due to cost. There is also the problem where cities are having problems trying to get their less attractive impactful projects funded. Agora Neos plans to solve both problems by offering a platform that would help cities get funded through crowdfunding their needs of capital, while making the process of buying part of a municipal bond seamless and for everyone. The problem is currently not solved today since there is no online platform that allows cities to crowdfund their projects by engaging their local communities.

Partner: Farmly

Dennis Chuong

Lily He

Jingtiong Gao

Adrian Chu

Project Overview:  “While the e-commerce industry is projected to surpass 6.5 trillion dollars in 2022, small farmers still rely on fruit stands, markets, and local restaurants to make ends meet. Farmly is looking to digitize the farmers market experience and bring small farmers into the growing online economy. The platform will provide customers with the story behind each farmer’s product and the ability to vote with their dollar for organic, ethical, and small farming practices. Farmly plans to launch both a website and mobile app to serve the western United States in 2021.” – Farmly CEO

Dylan, the CTO, shared about the experience of the average small farmer. We looked at a small farmer who grows almonds. Because they do not grow enough produce to sell directly to grocery stores, they have to sell their produce to a regional broker, who would accumulate the product and sell the produce to a Southern California broker. The Southern California broker would then sell the produce to a California broker, who would finally sell the produce to whole foods. The farmer might have sold a pound of almonds for 5 cents, but customers would buy that same unit for $5. Thus, farmers are not maximizing their products.

Through Farmly, we hope to cut out the middlemen so that small farmers may earn more for their produce. One similar solution but in a different format to the problem could be local farmer’s markets. However, to sell produce at a farmer’s market, there are many factors that need to be considered: operation day and hours, transportation, equipment, fees, parking, and etc. There are also e-commerce platforms like Amazon, Etsy, and eBay, but they are not the solution that farmers need. They do not market themselves as produce platforms, and “​consumers don’t trust buying produce off of these platforms” (from Farmly research). We aim to create a platform specifically for farmers to solve the problem.

Partner: Savauto

Conner Contreras

Mark Lehecka

Jose Sanchez Rodriguez

Kristina Mitriachkina

Project Overview:  The auto-repair industry is one of few industries that has not changed with the rise of pro-consumer technologies. Even with services such as Yelp or Google, the consumer still has to do the bulk work of checking and calling multiple shops to find a reasonably-priced and reliable repair service. It’s extremely time-consuming and leaves the consumer vulnerable to being scammed by unreliable service and upcharges for the sake of finding a quick fix. As such, Savauto aims to build a platform that forces businesses to compete for the consumer’s business. By implementing a platform that incentivizes a company’s lowest competitive bid to repair a customer’s car we can revolutionize where consumers bring their business and the rate at which cars are repaired.

In our application, we will provide both an information retrieval engine and forum-styled feature where consumers can shop around at different shops in their area and submit queries to other consumers. Our application will also provide a method by which consumers can book services at auto shops. This will undermine shady business practices, and force a pro-consumer standardization in auto-repair. It’s a massive struggle when you move to a new city and don’t know the most reliable auto shops to turn to. The current solution involves people contacting auto repair shops they discovered via search engines, word of mouth, advertising, etc. Then, after receiving a quote, possibly reaching out to other shops for different pricing/turnaround times. Due to the cumbersome and time-demanding nature of this process, oftentimes the search for other competitive quotes is neglected. If someone had some options to choose from in a short amount of time, one can make a more informed decision.

Partner: Calit2

Nicholas Dinh

Andrew Park

Jason Ly

Project Overview:  In the world of equity and derivatives trading, information is everything. The problem lies in the fact that much of the information that could prove to be useful if used correctly is clouded with noise, making it difficult to extrapolate meaningful patterns from the raw indicators and data. Our goal is to develop algorithms to effectively extrapolate useful patterns from historical stock data and create a model to output a prediction of the stock’s future movement. We want to develop something that can cut through all the extraneous information, and provide clear and concise courses of action based upon analysis of historical data and technical indicators. Using the stock movement data, the model will notify a trader of a stock’s future increase or decrease in price. These alerts will be beneficial in assisting traders with their decisions in the market. In addition, our program will help traders identify market pricing inefficiencies in derivatives and identify patterns that would otherwise be difficult to spot either due to market noise or cognitive bias. Consistently profitable trading is both an art and a skill. Like any other skilled trade, it requires months if not years of practice and study to master. Most people do not have the time nor the dedication needed to achieve success in this field. As a result, every year millions of people put their money into short-term trades in the market hoping to earn additional income, only to lose the money they put in. We hope to build an algorithm that would aid those people out there who want to earn additional income through short-term trading of stocks, but who might not be able to dedicate their all to learning an entirely new skill.

The current solutions to the problem exist in the form of data subscriptions and licensed quant trading algorithms. However, the issue from these solutions sprouts from the scattered nature of all of the information and the costs required to access each particular piece. This means that while a trader can certainly acquire much of the information they need, it is too cost-prohibitive and cumbersome for it to be of significant use to an average trader in a market where time stops for nobody. The other problem with existing algorithmic solutions is that many of them are poorly designed and incapable of providing traders with exit strategies that have adequate risk management or are too specialized for a move that happens very rarely. On the other side of the spectrum, quant firms have sophisticated algorithms generating immense returns that run as direct competition against retail traders. There are also mathematical tools like the Black-Scholes model which are useful in theory, but are marred by a wide range of flaws due to the number of assumptions that are often made which detracts from a real-life application of their ideas without the use of significant proprietary modifications.

Abhijot Kaler

Jee Kim

Lydia Qiao

Brijesh Muthumanickam

Project Overview:  There is a critical need for improved understanding of treatment effectiveness for patients based on their age and overall health. Utilize data from the UC Data Health Warehouse to examine medication utilization among patients with high-risk comorbidities diagnosed with COVID-19 and correlate with health services utilization to determine which medications work most effectively based on patient characteristics. This project will help guide immediate treatment and prediction. An Android application demo has been developed. Its feature includes: package creation, created connection-endpoints for transferring the packets, reverse engineered so there’s a TCP/IP handshake, and SDB source code to intercept the connection.

Partner: Journeymxn

Justin Kang

Patrick Castillofuentes

Gabe De Mesa

Mugdhaa Patankar

Project Overview: Many high school students do not know what to do after they finish their academic curriculums. With little resources and guidance, they often end up feeling lost or hopeless despite increasing job opportunities and a large number of 4-year universities. Here is an example. As evidenced by the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, more and more high school students have been refusing to go to the colleges. There are many reasons for this including personal circumstances (illness, family, pregnancy, etc.) but one of the most discussed one is tuition. Today, in the virtue of social media, they get more exposed to complaints on the hundreds of thousands dollars tuition fees and get deterred by it. Some people even say that it will take more than 30 years to pay off the loan and discourage students from enrolling in a college. However, this is not true for most of the graduates. 72% of the people in age 25-32 have claimed that their degrees have already been paid off. Also, they earn more than $17,000 each year than those who did not get a college degree [1]. Although these data are helpful in planning for what to do after graduation, they are not readily available to high school students. Also, around 60% of community college students did not complete a degree in 8 years after they enrolled in a community college. This rate is slowly increasing after each year, meaning there is no profound solution to this issue. Despite their initial goal of transferring to a 4-year college, many did not continue on with that goal. We believe this issue comes from a lack of guidance and information about what it is like to go to community college and transfer from there. Therefore, it is in our best interest to provide accurate and useful information to those who struggle with planning for careers or colleges after graduation.

Partner: Evoke Neuroscience

Caitlin Manalansan

Adrian Ong

Steven Luu

Arman Heraldo

Project Overview:  As the leader in computational EEG, Evoke Neuroscience is focused on making brain health scans routine to help reduce the number of people living with treatable cognitive impairment. This is an important problem to solve as worldwide patch maintenance or feature updates are forced onto users. Windows patch and feature update maintenance methods also frequently change in subtle ways, ways in which the average user may not fully comprehend. Those changes result in an increased volume of customer support calls and incidents. If we are able to build a proof-of-concept for an eVox® laptop implementation that uses a robust and easily administered real-time operating system instead of Windows 10, preferably a Linux-based or BSD UNIX-based real-time operating system, we would then have come up with a solution for our Windows 10 related problems. We also need to ensure that we are minimizing the need to redesign or rewrite any proprietary application software.

In order to solve the problem we would build a proof-of-concept for an eVox laptop implementation that is an easily administered real-time operating system instead of Windows 10 while minimizing the need to redesign or rewrite any proprietary application software. First, the company/organization needs to determine whether or not they are a good candidate for migrating from Windows 10. If they are, then they must start with choosing the specific real-time operating system and other software, because everything has to be compatible with the selected operating system. Finally, scripting and imaging to create the complete environment must be done, which includes software installation and configuration.

Partner: Paciolan

Udayan Mandal

Aaron Brier

Nathan Cho

Tristan Sukampo

Vraj Shah

Project Overview:  We want to create a system that further reinforces the standard of social distancing by allowing ticket buyers to purchase tickets with zero contact with another human being. This will be done to lessen the risk of any viral transmission to the customer and ensure that both the buyer and seller of any ticket sold through Paciolan are paying and receiving the correct amount. This is also important because this method will streamline the process of paying for the tickets and getting to the event faster. Contactless payment is currently implemented with EMV devices, which can accept cards, Near Field Communication (NFC)-enabled smartphones, and wearables. The consumer must hold their payment device within 1-2 inches of the point-of-sale terminal, and the payment account information is then transmitted wireless. These transactions are cryptographically secure.

Partner: Hire Right

Hieu Tran

Andrew Chen

Mayank Sharma

Brandon Tang

Joshua Gomes

Project Overview: Address normalization and matching are critical tasks for all location-based services, from using maps to performing geographical research. Specifically, the tasks consist of first normalizing free-text addresses into clean, usable values and then determining if two addresses are a match.

HireRight would like to take address normalization/matching and apply it to criminal records checks verified through addresses within some radius of a given location. This will help HireRight verify its criminal background checks with addresses, which is a valuable source of validation.

While Google Maps is a powerful search tool, the service does not prioritize address accuracy or validation. In fact, Google Maps can return the approximate location for an address that does not even exist. For instance, an address that has a real street name, zip code, and state but a fake apartment number can still return an approximate location based on the accurate information. This is a clear problem since people are expecting Google Maps (and similar software) to return meaningful and accurate information, not just rough approximations. Not only can this mean inconveniences for everyday users, it also means that any service that attempts to use Google Maps’ API has a similar risk of failing.

Partner: forMed

Corey Tan

Jose Martinez

Andy Li

Tejas Mukund Gadre

Project Overview:  Our sponsor would like an at-home eye care delivery system for eye care management. To do so, they require an online portal managing the information given between patients and doctors. It is important for secure information updates as well as reduced waiting times, especially during a time like during the current pandemic. As of today, there exist some websites that provide an online doctor consultation service but not many of them are tailored specifically towards eye-care. Majority of eye-care websites focus mainly on eye examinations and not to cater to intensive eye-care.

Partner: Let’s Fika MultiMedia

Albert Zhang

Jingcheng Su

Bixia Deng

Weisheng Wang

Project Overview: Fika is an important tradition of Swedish culture, in which people have a coffee and cake break and talk with each other. The essence of Fika is to provide people with a chance to socialize and to share or listen to different perspectives. Entering the digital era, people gain more access to different contents and more convenience of sharing their own experiences. However, to gain more attraction, more and more people express themselves in terms of others’ comments or the amount of “likes” they receive. Therefore, we would like to bring the Fika tradition online through providing an online multimedia platform for people to share their stories and own thoughts while having less concerns with others’ comments. Bringing the Fika tradition online is important not only because the COVID pandemic restricts people from face-to-face interaction, but also because, in that fashion, one’s voice will be much more broadly spread and heard by a larger spectrum of people. Furthemore, restricting the users from commenting on the contents will encourage content providers to provide their own opinions and meaningful contents.

The purpose of this project is to allow everyone to have a voice without threats, bias, and exclusiveness. Most media platforms contain many hateful and inappropriate comments instead of positive or supportive feedback. Different from these platforms on the market, Let’s Fika wants to deliver different voices without “liking” or “comments” and have some meaningful small talks or stories with a fika. Our current solution is to build a platform similar to TED Talks with more restricting functionalities to users, which Let’s Fika will only allow administrators to upload and manage these interviews.

Partner: Agora Neos

Derek Ye

Minh-Tam Doan

Harvey Yin

Zhenhao Gong

Project Overview: Currently, it’s hard for citizens of a city to directly invest in their local municipal projects (via bonds). The city goes through different legal counsel and underwriters before passing the bonds to institutional and individual investors via their brokerage accounts, most of whom don’t have a choice in what projects their money funds. Agora Neos’ platform aims to connect cities and communities by making investing in municipal bonds easier and allowing people to choose exactly what their money goes towards.

In order for the local governments to raise capital, they sell government-issued bonds that buyers receive interest on. Currently, institutions control the process of sellings bonds. The smallest bond generally offered is $5000, which works fine for wealthy people with sitting cash to spend. However, this makes it difficult for the vast majority of people to buy bonds.

Partner: Dutt Research Group

Leo Zhou

Travis Yu

Andy Chen

Project Overview: The traditional healthcare approach is limited and needs solving because with personalization, doctors have a limited view of the background of patients and it is difficult for doctors to review the background of patients. Monitoring is limited to in-person visits, one-time and limited data, and relies on subjective data. Feedback can only happen during the next visit. It is important to develop a fast healthcare control system that can test new approaches and collect and process data. Today, healthcare consists of monitoring through in-person visits, assessment based on monitoring, and feedback in another visit. The project this quarter will be to work with the native app team to develop a watch app that can be user-customized for several study groups.

We are working on the backend, which is written in Python. We are using GitHub to store the repository and Trello for tickets. We will use MongoDB, Flask, Mongoengine, RabbitMQ, and Celery. We will first familiarize ourselves with the codebase and the technologies. We will start by working on small bugs and then we will cooperate with the native frontend team to finish the development of the watch app this quarter.