Trivia Bot

A bot used to solve trivia questions from games such as HQ.

HQ Trivia is a popular live trivia game which awards cash prizes to users who manage to answer all questions asked during the show correctly. The game asks questions across a myriad of genres, making it extremely difficult to win. Trivia Bot provides some help along the way.

HQ Trivia Gameplay

The game provides 3 options to answer a question within 10 seconds. The bot listens to the game's question stream via websockets and leverages online search engines to help the user by quickly suggesting the most relevant answer.

Trivia Bot Output

Trivia Bot searches online and suggests the most relevant answer for each question. The numbers next to each option represent the number of matches found online for that particular answer when searching the question. The additional queries represent more complicated but slightly riskier analysis using NLP, question + answer concatenation and other methods.

Evolution

The first iteration of the bot used QuickTime media player to capture and mirror the output of an iPhone screen to a Macbook screen. The bot would then take a screenshot and use Google OCR to extract the question and answer text. However, this process resulted in a lot of OCR inaccuracies and long runtimes for the bot.

To solve this, Charles Web Debugging Proxy was used to intercept traffic from the HQ game (iPhone application) and discover credentials such as API keys and websocket streams feeding questions to the game. This evolution siginificantly increased both the speed and accuracy of the bot.

Seat Monitor

A web application used to monitor class enrollment at UCLA.

UCLA is one of the largest colleges by student population and notoriously difficult for enrolling into certain classes. Oftentimes, students will constantly monitor the enrollment of a class to try and find open seats. Seat Monitor provides a portal where users can register with email/phone number and input classes that they want to monitor. The application leverages a script to monitor the enrollment of those classes and send users a real-time email or SMS notification when spots become available in the class. Users can also log back into the portal at any time to modify their classes or preferences.

Bruin Dining

A backend used to scrape and view information about UCLA Dining Hall menus.

UCLA has some of the best dining halls in the country and a diverse variety of menu options. Bruin Dining allows users to process information about the menus and dining hours with a clean, informative API.

UCLA Dining Website

The UCLA Dining Website has a lot of nutrional information on its menus, but it is hard to organize or operate on this data. Bruin Dining allows developers to easily access this data to build applications or perform statistical analysis.

Bruin Dining API

Bruin Dining uses Cheerio JS to parse the UCLA Dining website and extract data from the website's HTML. Each REST API endpoint provides a JSON response that makes it easy for developers and other users to filter or organize the data.

Documentation

The Bruin Dining backend website provides documentation for the various APIs that can be used to obtain dining information.

Pulse Sensor

A pulse monitor circuit that measures a user's heart rate.

Pulse Sensor measures a user's pulse by calculating voltage changes caused by the user's finger resting on an infrared transmitter/receiver diode circuit. The myDAQ acquires data from the circuit and the pulse is visualized with a graph in LabVIEW. An Arduino is used to calculate the BPM and display it on the screen.

Breach Tracker

A chrome extension that finds data breaches associated with the currently loaded website.

With all the recent news about data breaches, such as with Equifax or Facebook, Internet users are confronted with growing privacy concerns. Breach Tracker helps inform Internet users while also alleviating some of these concerns by providing transparency. Breach Tracker acts as a tool informing users in real-time about any data breaches associated with the websites they visit.

Learn more about Breach Tracker (winner of LA Hacks 2018 PIA Challenge - Best Privacy Hack) here.