The Need

To connect people, resources, and events within a university, individuals create informative materials, such as websites, videos, and flyers. All of these are passive means of outreach require active engagement from individuals on campus. In addition, materials provided for outreach are typically distributed across different physical locations, webpages, email chains, etc. Smartphone applications offer a potential solution to provide students, employees, and alumni with centralized portal for campus updates.

The Technology

Kedar Hiremath from The Ohio State University Office of Academic Affairs has developed a matchmaking application that harnesses existing databases to push people, resources, and other interesting items to users' smartphones. The app can be used for people within a university, such as potential collaborators, trainees, and mentors. These people can then explore various resources, such as grants, equipment, and other opportunities, as well as receive notifications for events, news, and publications. The app serves as a hub for collaborators, a central place to look for opportunities, resources, and other collaborators. Objective data, such as publication record, current funding, and department rosters can be paired with more subjective or prospective data, including future research ideas and career aspirations, creating "collisions" between like-minded users. The app purposefully and actively engages users by sending a fixed number of notifications per day to each user's phone. In addition, the app's notification system offers highly accurate suggestions, built on keyword preferences as well as learning from the user's correct (swiping right) and incorrect (swiping left) proposed matches.

Commercial Applications

• Academic organizations looking to increase network connectivity of their people and resources

Benefits/Advantages

• Active engagement of potential collaborators
• Consolidates distributed materials into a central location
  • Users can find everything in one place, rather than searching across the university or the Internet
• Easy to use