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FindA aggregates student and campus information in easy-to-use app

A group of students in COS 333: Advanced Programming Techniques have created FindA, an app that enables University students to find, in one central location, five things:the nearest bathroom, the nearest printer, another student’s dorm room, the location and time of a class, and a professor’s office.

FindA, listed in Apple’s App Store as Princeton FindA, was made by Curtis Belmonte ’16, Emily Hsu ’16, Lucas Mayer ’16 and Kyle Dhillon ’16.Students must log in through the Centralized Authentication System, the same system used to log into Blackboard or Integrated Course Engine, in order to access the app’s features.

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The app’s name was one of the first things they decided on, Dhillon noted.

“What is our app doing? It’s finding!” Dhillon said.

The idea for the app originally came from Belmonte’s residential college adviser, who suggested they make something to help students find bathrooms and bathroom codes. From there, Belmonte explained, they started thinking of other things people may want to find.

Computer science professor Brian Kernighan GS ’69, who teaches COS 333, said the idea was amazing because bathroom codes and other such information are currently inconveniently scattered across several websites and sources. This existing decentralization of information, Hsu said, was not user-friendly.

Kernighan is a former faculty columnist for The Daily Princetonian.

“The idea [was] taking all of that information which was in a variety of different places in the web, and bringing it to a central location where it would be easy to access for students,” Belmonte said.

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The creators said their biggest challenge was “scraping” the data from its various sources.The location of student dorm rooms, for example, is from Princeton’s College Facebook andPrincetonFacilities work order forms, while printer information is on the Office of Information Technology website, all of which students already have access to.

“An important part was being able to normalize all that data and make it all work together, and we have a bunch of scripts that do that for us — we automate the whole process,” Belmonte said.

The group also found challenges in getting bathroom codes for their app, which are generally not made public for security reasons. They originally thought of asking RCAs but wanted to go through official channels, having seenthe shutdown of Passes for Late Meal, which unknowingly circumvented University policies.

They tried making concessions with administrators — only providing the codes to female students, for example — but have not yet succeeded.

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Although the group members only had one Mac and one iPhone among them, they said they were able to develop the app for iOS and are considering developing it for Android if there seems to be enough demand from students.

The four don’t plan on trying to make FindA profitable in the near future, as their only expenditure was a $100 fee to put it on Apple’s App Store. They said they are simply working on bug fixes and data improvement for now, and may add a feature to find laundry rooms.

Anastasia Georgiou ’16, originally a member of the team before dropping the class, said she loves the app, but added that knowing where laundry rooms are would be something she finds useful.

“I used it quite a lot the first two weeks of classes to find where all my classes were,” Georgiou said. “I didn’t have to write them down; I could find them instantaneously while walking to class.”

Josh Burd ’17, however, said he uses the printer and bathroom locators almost daily but also thinks the quick access to information about student’s dorm rooms can be a little creepy.

“If I know someone well enough that I can go to their room for any reason, I definitely know them well enough to find them on Facebook or find them via our Gmail accounts, and ask them what their room number is,” Burd said.

Kernighan said the vast majority of projects in the class understandably target University students’ academic and social lives, and that most do not seek profit, but rather wish to solve a problem on campus.

“I think there are a lot of these apps that are worth further development,” Kernighan said. “That’s a beautiful one for the Princeton environment and for [other universities].”