Democamp Presentations

DemoCamp is an opportunity to demo and present a project that you or a team have been working on.

We would like to congratulate the top 3 winners of Democamp!

  1. Project: UW Flow

    Team: Mack Duan, David Hu, Jamie Wong, Sandy Wu, all from the University of Waterloo

    Description: Flow is a website designed to help students at the University of Waterloo plan their university courses. The website offers descriptions, schedules, ratings, and reviews for courses offered at the university. It also allows students to see what courses their friends are taking, what they've taken, and their thoughts on those courses. To date, 4400 students have signed up for the product, along with others who use the website without an account.

    Project inspiration, founding story, and relevant links: We met each other through being classmates over the past 4 years. Over a year ago, we decided to work on a project together and brainstormed hundreds of ideas about what to build. We ended up continuing and expanding on a side project that one of the team members, Mack Duan, had already been working on. His project tackled the problem of trying to make informed course decisions when we had to select courses each term. http://uwflow.com/

  2. Project: The Wub Machine

    Team: Peter Sobot - Waterloo

    Description: Remix your favourite music into Dubstep, Swing, or any other popular genre at the click of a button. Over 1,000,000 remixes served! Available on the web, iOS or Android.

    Project inspiration, founding story, and relevant links: The idea came out of a hack day at Waterloo (SE Hack Day). Live and free at http://the.wubmachine.com.

  3. Project: Homunculus Series AR

    Team: Rohan Likhite and Ursula Sarracini from York University

    Description: This is an experiment designed for the IOS/Android platform. It features augmented 3D models which extend the physical installation titled Homunculus Agora by Dr. Mark-David Hosale. This application along side the physical installation was displayed in the Markham Museum for the LandSlide Art Exhibition. This application is a virtual representation launched when the user scans a designated target with their device.
    Through the app, visitors of the gallery are immersed within an augmented reality experience that provides an alternate view and virtual flythrough of the piece. In addition, series of markers located in the exhibition connect to virtual information panels that describe various aspects and details of the work.
    This application was showcased alongside Dr. Hosale's piece in the following countries:
    1) Canada (LandSlide Future Possibilities Exhibit - Ontario)
    2) China (Shenzhen Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture - Hong Kong)
    3) Denmark (renew Digital Arts Forum - Copenhagen)
    It is currently available on the Google Play Store, and is in the process of being accepted to the Apple AppStore.

    Project inspiration, founding story, and relevant links: We were recruited by the artist who required developers to design a mobile application that would accompany his piece in the Markham Museum. Dr. Mark-David Hosale was also interested in taking his piece to several different exhibitions internationally, and wanted a standalone application which would provide users with information on the piece as well as extend the virtual experience.
    We met with the artist and brainstormed ideas for an augmented reality concept which was later on developed and exhibited in the museum. Due to the large physical size of the piece, transporting it internationally was not feasible, therefore this application would be useful for those who wanted to see the piece in it's entirety. Inspiration was drawn from the idea of virtual spaces, and the idea of experiencing physical objects without being physically present in the space.
    Here is a link to the Google Play store where Homunculus Series AR can be downloaded: http://bit.ly/1d1rzvq
    **It is currently in the process of being accepted to the Apple AppStore.

Thank you to all of our other Democamp presenters. We wish you the best of luck with your projects!

Below are the list of presentations, in no particular order.

  1. Project: FBomb.co

    Team: Martin Gingras - Carleton University

    Description: See where in the world the fBomb was dropped. This is an interactive map that shows where people are using the F-word on Twitter. The app is written in CoffeeScript and uses the express framework for Node.js. It hooks into Twitter's streaming api, particularly the POST statuses/filter and uses bootstrap, JQuery, and Google Maps on the front end. Since being published in late October last year, the app has received international press coverage, 3K+ shares on Twitter, 9K+ shares on Facebook, and over 250K unique visitors from around the world.
    There is a full write up at .http://mgingras.ca/coding/fBomb/

    Project inspiration, founding story, and relevant links: My inspiration for this application actually came from a discussion I had with two colleagues of mine while doing co-op at BlackBerry, Ryan Seys and Elliott Ro. We were talking about how people misuse and abuse the english language. As the conversation devolved swearing was brought up. In particular we talked about how swearing can completely undermine ones argument. Earlier that day we had been talking about the personal projects we were working and, somehow at this point we circled back to that topic. From there our conversation wound it's way to how it'd be neat to map where people swear. Within a few minutes and iterations of ideas the concept for the app was born.
    Project: http://www.fbomb.co - Code: http://github.com/mgingras/fBomb

  2. Project: Textchange

    Team: Yann Landry, Université de Moncton

    Description: Tired of being robbed at the bookstore? Use Textchange to advertise, sell, exchange your used textbooks in a convenient, clear and organized way. http://textchange.ca

    Project inspiration, founding story, and relevant links: The base concept already exists and is pretty simple. There was a need for such a platform in my region so I went forward with the idea. Textchange was builded during the summer of 2013 after my work hours.

  3. Project: Research on Intelligent Machines

    Team: Brandon Byskov - McMaster University

    Description: I'm doing research on Intelligent Machines. I'm looking at the math behind how they would operate and the abstract models on which they could be based. I'm also exploring the how to design such a model of intelligence and considerations around various aspects of the design and implementation of intelligent machines. I’ve been incorporating many diverse ideas into my work, from my own investigative research, to the mathematical and philosophical works of Aristotle and George Boole, and to the modern ideas in artificial intelligence from the last 60 years.
    I’m working on this project independently. I'm writing a series of papers on this topic. The first paper in the series is close to completion, and will be a 30-page broad introduction to the fundamental theory behind this work and to serve as an intuitive basis from which to understand later works in the series.

    Project inspiration, founding story, and relevant links: I was inspired by some lectures that we're given by Stanford professor Andrew Ng, where he discussed deep learning algorithms and the brain. Since over one year ago, I haven't been able to stop thinking about this problem of how to build an intelligent machine. Ray Kurzweil, Director of Engineering at Google, believes that we’re very close to building this type of technology, and that's the goal I'm working towards.

  4. Project: Earthbarely

    Team: Spencer Kelly (Queens)

    Description: A more provocative, and sexy interface to wikipedia and the semantic web.
    A better way of learning.

    Project inspiration, founding story, and relevant links: http://xkcd.com/214/
    http://earthbarely.com
    Just dropped out to build this, and am mostly terrified.

  5. Project: Lousy Landlord

    Team: Devon Ring - Carleton University

    Description: A web applocation in which users are able to post comments about their landlords.

    Project inspiration, founding story, and relevant links: A personal episode of a lousy landlord.

  6. Project: NodeJS + Jawbone UP

    Team: Ryan Seys - Carleton University

    Description: I wrote a Jawbone UP API Library for NodeJS (npmjs.org/jawbone-up)
    I also created a 'steps' app which uses the above library to get total steps ever walked with UP. I hope to expand this app into something everyday users can use to gauge progress and work towards a much bigger goal than just a daily '10000' steps.
    Looking for additional ideas to build out apps for the Jawbone UP platform and get people motivated to becoming more active.

    Project inspiration, founding story, and relevant links: I use a Jawbone UP daily to track sleep and movement habits and I noticed a lack of applications built for the platform, despite a lovely API given and supported by Jawbone. I hope to help kick-start some development on the platform to promote healthier living and to better understand my habits.
    node-jawbone-up: http://github.com/ryanseys/node-jawbone-up
    steps: http://github.com/ryanseys/steps

  7. Project: estimatemymiles.com

    Team: Wendy Liu, McGill University

    Description: estimatemymiles.com is a free tool that allows frequent flyers to make informed decisions about which flight to take in order to maximise the mileage accrued. Whether you're saving miles for a round-the-world trip, or trying to meet an elite qualification threshold, or simply want to optimise your flight plans to earn more miles, estimatemymiles.com can help you get there.
    Built using Django and AngularJS. Source on Github: http://github.com/dellsystem/estimatemymiles.com

    Project inspiration, founding story, and relevant links: I built it as a result of how difficult it is to find mileage accrual information on official airline websites.
    Link: http://estimatemymiles.com

  8. Project: MacPoint

    Team: Thusanthan Kannan, Kulwinder Billen, Jerry Oku) - McMaster

    Description: MacPoint is a proposed solution towards the current problem of the McMaster University's community unable to navigate throughout the campus due to the lack of an user-friendly and interactive navigation system. MacPoint is a mobile application where one can easily identify the various buildings spread throughout the campus and their respective hours of operation in a visually elegant presentation.
    Currently, MacPoint is implemented to work with Android devices as it is in the state of beta testing and it will be implemented to also accommodate iOS, BlackBerry and Windows devices.

    Project inspiration, founding story, and relevant links: In December 2011, Thusanthan stayed late on McMaster University campus and was looking to purchase refreshments from a Tim Hortons.
    Unfortunately, he did not realize that every establishment was closed for the night. Frustrated, Thusanthan had an epiphany, realizing he could have saved so much time and energy if he had only known the opening and closing times beforehand. After consulting his close friends, Kulwinder Billen and Jerry Oku who became close friends through university, the trio decided to remedy this problem through the creation of a new Android application, MacPoint.

  9. Project: Brog

    Team: Antoine Grondin, William Pearson, uOttawa

    Description: Static blog engine using filesystem notifications, Markdown and Go templates.
    Brog := Blog Engine + Borg Collective

    Project inspiration, founding story, and relevant links: Just wanted to learn about the `fsnotify` API and create myself a simple blog engine for personal use.

  10. Project: DSKVS

    Team: Antoine Grondin, uOttawa

    Description: An in-memory, eventually persisted data store of the simplest design, dskvs stores its data in two layers of maps, which are routinely persisted to disk by a janitor.
    dskvs stands for Dead Simple Key-Value Store. The aim of this library is to provide storage solution for Small Data™ apps. If your data set holds within the RAM of a single host, dskvs is the right thing for you.

    Project inspiration, founding story, and relevant links: Wanted to have a very simple embedded DB to make apps quickly at hackathons.

  11. Project: ideas.iterate.ca

    Team: Michael Chang, University of Waterloo / Louisa Chong, University of Waterloo

    Description: A tool to tell student entrepreneurs if their start-up/project idea is "obviously bad" (i.e. falls into an industry or market which is known to be difficult for students to build a start-up/project in), and why it is "obviously bad".

    Project inspiration, founding story, and relevant links: I came up with the idea while observing students participating in the Winter 2014 offering of VeloCity bootcamp for an independent study project. I met my team members during the same offering of VeloCity bootcamp.
    Live Demo: http://ideas.iterate.ca/
    Source Code: https://github.com/cbhl/ideas.iterate.ca

Democamp sponsored by Velocity

DemoCamp is an opportunity to demo and present a project that you or a team have been working on.

The Game: You have 10 minutes to pitch your work, no slides, only working code. You’ll then have a couple of minutes to answer questions from the audience.

The Players: Individual or a Team!

Your Tools: A project you worked on for school or developed on your own time.

The Prize: The top 3 teams as voted by the audience will receive prizes sponsored by Velocity. In addition, the team in 1st place will receive an exclusive invitation to dinner with our speakers and sponsor representatives.

In addition to presenting to an audience of fellow CUSEC attendees, you will be presenting to a panel of judges made up of speakers and sponsors whose job it is to offer feedback, advice, and their expertise.

Thank you for your interest in Democamp, submissions are currently closed.