Often when talking about artificial intelligence, the common person may think that the AI has a mind of its own, and makes decisions with thorough processes like we do. This is in fact not the case, and misinformation about AI is a large problem in today’s world. Fortunately, we can often find web sources that help educate the public about the fundamental elements of a neural network. However, it seems that these education sources are targeted towards already knowledgeable adults, and the few that target others seem to teach conceptual understanding poorly. Having the entire public engaged and understanding the parts that make up a neural network can spur interest and learning for the future generations that take on AI, and limit early misunderstandings about its fundamentals. In response to this dilemma, we developed a website that educates people about the inner workings of a neural network in a simple and easy to understand way! It comes complete with an interactive playground to train and test your own neural network, and a video explaining visual neural networks simply.
Understanding how to execute a full iterative design process from start to finish is extremely important for founders, designers, and engineers alike. Being able to take a problem statement to a clicakable protoype is a test in both design and teamwork skill, and as an exercise gives a better understanding of the creation process as a whole. My team and I reached out and received a design problem from a real Y combinator startup company, and fully redesigned their website, from clarifying the problem all the way to presenting a full design prototype to the founder, with multiple refining steps throughout.
Development is obsiously an extremely important skill to learn in order to fully understand design. Knowing how something can be implemented is important if you want to design for it! Along with this, it is also important to be able to learn and analyze the strengths and weaknesses designs have, in order to effectively work to improve them! In this project, I developed an interactive interface using React, which can tie data in an internal state, and aggregate sort!
This was my second year at Hack@Brown, and I believe that this project was an opportunity to work on something more difficult and expand my knowledge in software development, APIs, and software compatibility!
Thinking within the realm of the hackathon's theme of space, our team wanted to take a different route. We realized we were all really curious about gravity and the different ways that it worked, and we combined that thought with one of the worst theories on space that exists: the earth being flat. Our website is an interactive experience that explores the strange implications of what it would actually mean if our world was flat. To complete this we used a combination of React and the Unity Engine to create the site. These are two very different software, and Unity generally is not made for websites, so it took a lot of work to seamlessly integrate the two to create our experience. Through the paths of React and Unity we worked in C#, JavaScript, and HTML, as well as used multiple different libraries. This project was done in under 24 hours!
Alzheimer's is a serious neurodegenerative disease, and having a way to spot it early is incredibly important. Often, however, early signs are both hard to spot and difficult to talk about. Our app is meant to both screen for early signs of Alzheimer's or other forms of cognitive decline over long periods of time, and train your brain against it! Rocket Recall is a web application that is meant to be visited often! Users log in and play daily cognitive games. The purpose of our application is that over time, as users make our daily games a habit and more data on their scores is collected, a downward trajectory in performance can be a big signaler of cognitive decline and an early sign of neuro degeneracy. Our users can send their data to their family or health care providers, so physicians can get the data they need to track progress and screen for issues. We made this in 36 hours from scratch, it was within the top 5% of projects submitted, and received offers for funding!
Over the winter break of my Freshman year at Brown University, I wanted to learn and grow in a new hobby related to programming. I was interested in Computer Science and planned on majoring in it, but I lacked a hobby in the subject that I would actually spend my free time doing. Going down the rabbit hole starting with JavaFX games for TicTacToe, Tetris, and Othello (google it), I was intrigued by the idea of coding games in a much more efficient and large-scale manner. All that lead me to an interest in Game Development, and the Unity Game Engine.
Since then I have put a lot of time and effort into learning and understanding game engines and their abilities, becoming fluent in new programming languages such as C#, and discovering how to coordinate a team to create something special. To date, I have developed and published a demo using Unity and C#, and am currently in the progress of developing a full-scale demo of my next title.
A peek into the development of our next game...
Current Game Prototype (Credit to Kaley Newlin for all Art)
Hack@Brown 2023
I entered into my university's hackathon competition Hack@Brown with a team of 3 other people, and we decided we wanted to make a game in Unity based off of the theme of the event, which was camping.
The game is titled "Way Back Home", a tale of a little flame falling from the heavens and going on an adventure to light up a very dark world. The hackathon lasted only over the weekend, so we had 24 hours to brainstorm, plan, organize, design, and launch a fully-working demo of the game. In the end, we managed to create the game completely from scratch in the Unity Game Engine, design 5 levels, and launch it on a website using React. I would like to thank my teammates Kaley Newlin, Nancy Zhu, and Jesus Rodriguez for the amazing time and product. We ended the hackathon as one of the winning teams! Click the link at the bottom of the page to play our award-winning demo!
