The goal of affordable is to build a set of different integration options such that applications can be easily ported into the system and make it easy to use for 3rd parties and for users alike. When we are thinking about making Affordable accessible to small organizations and individual users, the Health Utilizing Grants is our answer. By having an internal system for people to both raise money and manage their currently funded grants/programs, people have ways to easily improve the community health that will have the most impact.
Professor Purtilo with the University of Maryland Computer Science Department runs a capstone project where students lean-to workshop and develop a project from start to finish. Affordable is one of these projects that is dedicated to a team of senior student developers to scope out and tackle a design challenge and build out the final product that will be capable of being utilized by our application.
The team utilized ReactJS for the construction of the client-side front end display. While this requires some learning from the team that only had mostly javascript experience, the modular nature of the components makes them easy to expand once a primary framework is built. They also implemented a MySQL server, a popular option for implementing a database. This is how they were able to build out an MVP (minimum viable product) from these tools.
The back end team devised interesting strategies to help automatically match people to the grants that were listed in the system. While old schematics involved the user picking the programs that were the best fit for them, this system would evaluate and compare the information on the profile of the users to then find the best batch from the providers. This would help find a happy medium matching process that would increase the applicant pool for these grants while also ensuring a strong fit to the purpose of that grant. These systems were implemented and documented for future teams to expand on. We thank the UMD students for trying to improve our system’s model and implementation so that future groups can expand these concepts and make our engine more powerful down the road. We wish them success in their careers moving forward.
Maximilian Dale is a super-senior, double degree undergraduate student at the University of Maryland College Park, studying Computer Science and German. Maximillian had the fortunate opportunity to study abroad in Munich, Germany in 2017 at the Munich University of Applied Sciences, where three of my five courses were taught in German. His interests in Computer Science has been in data-processing and data-analytics As to my future plans, Maxl plans to remain in academia longer.
Kenny Nguyen is a senior Computer Science major from Maryland. He loves chilling at home and play all games such as chess, poker, and League of Legends in his free time. He plans to land a Software Engineering job in sometime in the future to be able to live comfortably for the rest of his life.
Rohan Bharadwaj is a senior Computer Science and Economics major at the University of Maryland. He has an interest in financial analytics and data science and will be working full time as an associate software developer at T Rowe Price after graduation.
Varun Tarhun is a senior in computer science at UMD with a minor in statistics, He is am currently an intern at Reality AI and plan to pursue my graduate studies in the field of computer science specializing in data science.
