Matching Engine

The matching engine is built to match students with each other & ideas!

This matching engine streamlines the formation of three-person student teams, optimizing for collaboration and project success. It processes student data from a CSV file, incorporating information such as interests, project ideas, and goals. By leveraging cosine similarity calculations, the engine identifies students with closely related intellectual pursuits while ensuring a balanced distribution of technical, financial, and other essential skills critical for scaling up team productivity.

The program computes cosine similarity scores to analyze domains of Interest, majors, project ideas, and participation goals. This approach guarantees that each team is strategically composed of members with expertise from different domains at most.

Installation

To clone the app, run in the terminal:

git clone https://github.com/ac-i2i-engineering/matching-engine.git
cd matching-engine

Set up a virtual environment and activate it to "containerize" the dependencies:

python3 -m venv env
source env/bin/activate

To run the app locally, run:

pip install -r requirements.txt
cd matching_backend
python manage.py makemigrations
python manage.py migrate
python manage.py runserver

System Architecture

graph TB
    A["Read CSV File"] --> B{Contains Expected Cols?}
    B -- No --> C["Throw Error"]
    B -- Yes --> D["Clean Data"]
    D --> J["Standardize & Create User Profiles"]
    J --> L["Form Teams"]
    L --> M["Calculate Final Scores"]
    L --> P["Form Initial Teams (Roles)"]
    M --> N["Calculate Cosine Similarity"]
    M --> O["Calculate Interests/Goals Scores"]
    N --> Q["Match Best Engineer & Finance"]
    O --> Q
    P --> Q
    Q --> R["Handle Leftovers & Final Teams"]
    R --> U["Render Teams in HTML"]

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Expected Input CSV data format

Timestamp	Email Address	Full Name	Class Year	Major	Additional Major 1	Additional Major 2	Domains of Interest	Do you have an idea(big or small)?	What is your idea?	What stage are you at?	What role are you interested in taking on a team?	Has your team been registered?	If your team has not registered enter your email below and we will send you the form

CI/CD Testing & Deployment Pipeline

We use modularized pytest-django-based unit-tests and GitHub Actions to test our backend ("business") logic in an end-to-end CI/CD environment. We also run custom regression-tests and deployment/integration-tests through a combination of technologies like Railway, Vercel & npm. This is to have health-checks on the system & give our developers extensive experience in technologies that they most-likely will encounter in industry settings.

Demo & screenshots: (Last updated 10th Sept, 2024)

• Youtube Demo link: https://youtu.be/oAPVXGaYS8Q