Projects

Here are a few of my personal and professional projects (click to read more about them):

Automatically Scalable Computation

Research project at Harvard University, Fall 2015

SnappeShop

Winning hackathon entry at BU Local Hack Day, Fall 2016

Magic Mirror

Raspberry Pi-powered mirror. Personal project, Summer 2016

Fenway Victory Gardens Companion App

Nonprofit mobile app developed over the course of a year. Fall 2016 - Spring 2017.

Zero-Gravity Game

Physics-based dueling game inspired by the training sequences in Ender's Game. Personal project, Summer 2015

Doran's Bot

Chatbot for Discord servers that provides useful information for gamers. Personal project, Spring 2016

BU Food Tracker

Simple text-based Python program that gives you advice about your BU meal plan. Personal project, Fall 2016

The Social Playlist

Hackathon entry at [email protected] 2017, Winter 2017

Scavenger Glasses

Hackathon entry at MakeMIT 2017, Spring 2017

TripAdvisor Data Project

Hackathon entry at Brown Datathon 2017, Spring 2017

Desktop Computer

Personal project, Spring 2012

Laverna

Personal project, Summer 2017

Dynamic Wall Art

Winning hackathon entry at MoMath Expressions, Summer 2017

Genie

Winning hackathon entry at PennApps XVI, Fall 2017

Serendipity

Hackathon entry at MIT's Reality Virtually Hackathon, Fall 2017

Rise

Hackathon entry at [email protected], Spring 2018

Automatically Scalable Computation

Automatically Scalable Computation (abbreviated ASC) is an ongoing research project between Harvard and Boston University that explores a new method of CPU parallelization. Rather than the traditional approach of compiling sequential programs into parallel programs at runtime, CPUs utilizing ASC execute sequential programs on a single CPU core and use any remaining CPU resources to predict and proactively execute future parts of the sequential program.

I developed code for ASC in my senior year of high school that parses and visualizes data generated by CPUs at execution time. My parsed data was used for efficiency analysis by other members of the project. I wrote my code using a Python 3.4 distribution with Numpy and SciPy packages, and also published a 32-page thesis on Amazon describing my work.

ASC research site My Amazon publication

SnappeShop

Snappeshop was an award-winning hackathon entry at BU Local Hack Day 2016. It is a mobile app that allows a user to snap a picture of an item they want to buy and receive four links to that item at different price points on eBay.

I and five other CS students developed this project in 12 hours. Snappeshop's frontend is written in Android Studio and its backend is written in Python 3.5. It uses IBM's Watson API for image recognition, the eBay Shopping API for product discovery, and Heroku cloud services for deployment.

I wrote the code that interacts with IBM Watson and eBay to determine what product to search for on eBay and which four price points to show the user.

GitHub Page

Magic Mirror

Over the summer of 2016, I designed and built a computer-powered magic mirror that displays live information such as the date, time, upcoming calendar events, weather forecasts, and news headlines.

I made it out of a Raspberry Pi, an LCD monitor, a 2-way mirror, and a pinewood enclosure that I designed and assembled myself. The enclosure is 16" x 26.25" with ventilation holes on its top and bottom sides. The mirror uses a customized version of Michael Teeuw's MagicMirror² software on Raspbian to display its live information.

Blog post coming soon! MagicMirror² site

Fenway Victory Gardens Companion App

The Fenway Victory Gardens are the oldest continuously-operating WWII Victory Gardens in the US. Across Fall 2016 and Spring 2017, The Global App Initiative at BU developed Android and iOS companion apps for the gardens. The goal of these apps were to keep gardeners informed about relevant events in their area and maintain a comprehensive list of the resources in the Victory Gardens.

I was the programming lead for the iOS development team of this project (about 10 members). The app is now complete and more information about it can be found in our GitHub repository.

GitHub Page Gardens website GAI website

Zero-Gravity Game

I and a classmate from high school programmed a physics-based dueling game inspired by the training sequences in Orson Scott Card's "Ender's Game." In it, a player and a computer-controlled bot shoot projectiles at each other in a two-dimensional zero-gravity arena. The duelists are not able to directly affect their positions in the arena; instead, they can only move themselves by generating momentum. Momentum is generated through firing projectiles and shooting magnetic grappling hooks at arena terrain.

I implemented several features of the game including its navigation menu, basic projectile physics, and grappling hook. The game was written in GML 1.4.

GitHub Page

Doran's Bot

I and a classmate from high school programmed a chatbot for the popular communication service Discord, nicknamed "Doran's Bot." Our bot fetches and displays live information about League of Legends games, such as profile statistics, champion winrates, and player availability.

The bot was written in Python 3.5 and uses several web APIs to collect its data.

GitHub Page

BU Food Tracker

Five out of the six dining plans at Boston University cost the same amount of money to enroll in. After agonizing over which plan I should choose for about an hour, I gave up and began writing a food tracker app to calculate which one I should choose. The result was this app, which returns information about the optimal number of meal swipes and dining dollars to use per day using a certain plan. The app took about a week to code.

It is written in Python 3.5 and uses the datetime module to evaluate differences between dates.

GitHub Page

The Social Playlist

The Social Playlist was a software entry at [email protected] 2017. It is a dynamically-generated music playlist hosted on the web, designed to solve the age-old problem of "whose music do we play?" The Social Playlist allows people to queue songs into a collaborative playlist that is accessible on any device with a browser. Alternatively, the app can use a webcam to gauge the emotional atmosphere in a room and try to play appropriate music. Multiple playlists can exist at any given time, each organized by a party name and password.

I and three other freshman students developed this project in 24 hours. It uses Meteor for its back end, basic HTML for its front end, plus the YouTube API and Microsoft Cognitive Services API for playlist management and emotion data respectively.

GitHub Page

Scavenger Glasses

Scavenger Glasses was a hackathon entry at MakeMIT 2017. It is a pair of Raspberry Pi-powered glasses that plays a scavenger hunt game though a web app hosted on a local network. It features a mounted camera that is used with an image recognition API to detect whether the wearer of the glasses has found the correct item. Player score and scavenger hunt tasks are displayed on the web app hosted by the Pi.

I and two other BU students developed this project in 16 hours. It uses Python 3.5 for its back end and Flask for its front end, plus Microsoft Cognitive Services API for image recognition. Also, we 3D printed all of Scavenger Glasses' non-Pi components!

GitHub Page

TripAdvisor Data Project

This project was a datathon entry at the Brown Datathon 2017. It predicts whether any given user on tripadvisor.com will purchase a hotel booking based on their behavior browsing the website. The program uses a neural network to make its predictions, which was trained and tested using a large .csv file provided by TripAdvisor. In the end, our network made booking predictions to an accuracy of roughly 82.3%.

I and three other students developed this project in 24 hours. It is written entirely in Matlab and uses the Matlab neural network toolbox. It's interesting to note that because about 21% of users in our given dataset booked hotels, our program's benchmark prediction accuracy was 79%; any degree of accuracy lower than that could always be beaten by guessing "no purchase will be made" for every user. So our 82.3% accuracy was actually a successful result.

GitHub Page

Desktop Computer, "MARVIN"

I loved video games when I was in 8th grade, so I built myself a gaming PC. This project took about 6 months and involved setting a build budget, researching components in a spreadsheet, and assembling those components. I named the computer Marvin, after the existential robot in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

5 years later, I still maintain and use it. The current specs: Intel i5 2550k (3.4 GHz), GeForce GTX 960, 8 GB RAM.

Laverna

Laverna was a personal project that I developed in my spare time during my internship in Summer 2017. It is a web app that allows university students to meet and talk with each other anonymously, through a one-on-one SMS chat channel that resets every 24 hours. Laverna's goal as a platform is to help foster a community at universities that overlooks social presuppositions frequently caused by race, appearance, and gender.

Laverna is written in Python 3.5. It uses Flask and Socket.IO to display live user information on its landing page and uses the Twilio Programmable SMS API to send SMS.

GitHub Page

MoMath Dynamic Wall Art

This project was an award-winning hackathon entry at MoMath Expressions 2017. It visualized several mathematical algorithms using MoMath's Dynamic Wall, a motorized wall comprised of 128 programmable metal slats. The algorithms this project visualized include bubble sort, selection sort, insertion sort, a "creased" sine wave (illustrated using the intersection of slats instead of just slat depth), a "creased" Fourier series convergence, a binary representation of the Fibonacci sequence, and a "creased" smiley face algorithm designed by our team.

I and three other students developed this project in 32 hours. It is written in Processing.

GitHub Page

Genie

Genie was an award-winning hackathon entry at PennApps XVI. It is a mobile app that securely reads a user's investment portfolio to display account information, plot relevant security prices, and talk to the user about their finances. Genie's chatbot interface responds to questions made in natural language with security information and risk analyses.

I and three other students developed this project in 36 hours. Genie is written in React Native and its backend server Lamp is written in Express. Lamp is hosted via AWS, uses the Blackrock Aladdin API to perform portfolio analysis, and uses the api.ai NLP API to parse natural language.

BlackRock's Chief Engineer, Jody Kochansky, wrote about Genie in his Medium article 3 "Hacks" That Could Change the World !

GitHub Page (Genie) GitHub Page (Lamp)
3 "Hacks" That Could Change the World

Serendipity

Serendipity was a hackathon entry at MIT's Reality, Virtually Hackathon. It is a mobile app that helps people navigate the city in a more intuitive way than top-down-facing maps, by projecting destination markers into the city in augmented reality.

I built Serendipity in a team of four using Unity, MapBox SDK, and ARKit.

GitHub Page

Rise

Rise was a hackathon entry at [email protected] 2018. It an IoT device with a web interface (pictured) that helps people wake up smoothly in the morning. Instead of loudly and suddenly waking a user from bed, Rise gradually opens their curtains to let in natural light, eventually turning on a light of its own and vibrating until a user wakes up calmly. It is also Alexa-integrated, so by asking Alexa to wake up at a certain time, users can verbally set up Rise.

I and three other Brown students built Rise in 36 hours. We used a Particle Photon board, Flask, and the Alexa skill builder to bring it to life.

GitHub Page

Warren Partridge

Programmer, Visual Artist, Hackathon Enthusiast.
Computer Science @ Boston University

About

Projects

Automatically Scalable Computation

SnappeShop

Magic Mirror

Fenway Victory Gardens Companion App

Zero-Gravity Game

Doran's Bot

BU Food Tracker

The Social Playlist

Scavenger Glasses

TripAdvisor Data Project

Desktop Computer

Laverna

Dynamic Wall Art

Genie

Serendipity

Rise