We at the UCI ANTrepreneur Center are excited to highlight student entrepreneurs and share their personal experiences, achievements, and brilliant insights. We invite you to join us as we celebrate these ANTrepreneurs and get inspired by their stories.
For undergraduate students looking to flex their programming, development, and problem-solving skills, hackathons offer the perfect opportunity to connect with other passionate innovators and challenge themselves to rapidly create new products. Recently, two students from the University of California, Irvine (UC Irvine) joined up with students from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) to compete in LA Hacks, the largest collegiate hackathon in Southern California held annually at UCLA’s Pauley Pavilion.
For three days, UC Irvine’s Abhigyan (Abhi) Arya (second-year Computer Science and Engineering) and Rishi Srihari (second-year Computer Science) worked with teammates Khiet Huynh (second-year Computer Science and Economics) and Anne Do (second-year Computer Science) to create Opennote. Opennote is a digital platform that allows students to transform their traditional notes and course materials into personalized videos with animations, voiceovers, and other features to make learning more engaging. At LA Hacks 2024, Opennote received high praise from the judges and was named the winning entry in the “Best Touch Screen Hack” and “Best Use of AI in Education” categories.
To learn more about Opennote and the incredible student entrepreneurs that brought it to life, Ryan Foland, Director of the UCI ANTrepreneur Center, met with Abhi, Rishi, Khiet, and Anne for an interview.
Ryan: Ahoy! It’s great to meet you all. Thanks for meeting with me and sharing more about Opennote and your recent experience at LA Hacks 2024. To start us off, what was it like competing at LA Hacks?
Anne: It’s nice to meet you; thank you for inviting us! For me, walking into Pauley Pavilion with the entire stadium set up for LA Hacks felt surreal. I felt the same when I heard about the company sponsors during the opening ceremony, when we pulled an all-nighter together to work on Opennote, and when we received two awards during the closing ceremony. Although there were challenges along the way, the experience was truly a dream.
Khiet: Participating in LA Hacks was a rewarding experience, and we’re glad we were able to complete most of what we originally planned. By the end of the event, our website was functioning with designs, our AI models successfully generated animations, and the videos were cleanly displayed with audio.
Beyond our project, we appreciated the opportunity to network with other hackers and judges. The LA Hacks Team was welcoming and attentive, enhancing our experience even further.
Ryan: What Inspired you to participate in LA Hacks
Anne: I had gone to a few hackathons before (IrvineHacks and AthenaHacks) and loved my experience. I learned so much by devoting just a couple weekends to developing my creative, technical, and collaborative skills. LA Hacks is a huge hackathon, and there wasn’t any way I was missing it when my dorm was just a 10 minute walk away.
Rishi: I had my first experience with hackathons earlier this year when I won IrvineHacks with Abhi in January. After that, my interest was piqued. The experience of building a marketable product, learning new technologies on the fly, dealing with inevitable development mishaps, and doing it all on a time crunch is a one-of-a-kind experience; it has taught me a lot about developing a scalable app and being able to pitch it effectively.
Abhi: Echoing Rishi, after winning IrvineHacks, I was hooked into hacking. I really benefited from the skills gained by building and shipping software. In my opinion, utilizing the skills we’ve learned while pursuing our degrees is a comprehensive test of our creativity, problem solving, and ability to piece together an idea into something to be proud of.
Ryan: Before LA Hacks, did you have any specific ideas or goals in mind for the hackathon?
Khiet: This was my first hackathon, so I did a lot of research into previous projects to get an idea of what to expect. Before LA Hacks, we had several virtual brainstorming sessions to discuss ideas. Initially, we considered projects focused on raising awareness about mental health and the importance of relaxation or developing a more personalized streaming platform. While planning the tech stack for those ideas, we were sidetracked by a discussion about our classes and work. Eventually, the idea came up to revolutionize the way we interacted with our notes, leading to the birth of Opennote.
Ryan: That’s really interesting; I think it’s cool how the ideation process can take so many twists and turns. You can start with one idea but end up with something completely new and inspired! Can you talk a little more about how you came up with the idea behind Opennote?
Khiet: Definitely. As STEM majors who had midterms before and after LA Hacks, that topic quickly came up when we were brainstorming. We came to realize there was a disconnect between taking notes during lecture and actually comprehending the material. Sometimes, this stems from the complexity of the material or the tendency for students to simply write down whatever professors say in class without fully understanding the concepts being taught. We also realized that if we had to miss lectures, borrowing friends’ notes didn’t always help due to differences in note-taking styles.
Abhi: To add to this, we all understood the experience of being in crowded lecture halls and struggling to ask questions. We realized that a lot of us felt more comfortable learning the material ourselves, but that unfortunately resulted in not having the same resources that we would elsewhere. We also noticed that this is common among many students. We built Opennote to integrate with the study methods that many of us already had in place, such as using Notion for notes, but built active recall of these documents into our AI systems, enhancing their ability to help students study at their own pace.
Ryan: How does Opennote work, and how does it address the gaps you identified during the ideation process?
Rishi: The idea behind Opennote is to make learning more interactive and engaging for students by taking their notes and material and turning them into narrated and interactive videos. Students can also talk to our chatbot—trained specifically for educational purposes—which can generate code snippets, practice problems, diagrams/graphs, and more to enhance their learning
Abhi: At its core, Opennote is a smart educational system that allows students to interact with tools, such as Notion, Obsidian, GitHub, Google Drive, and more, and effectively view their notes in animated form. Opennote makes learning a more interactive and personalized experience.
Anne: STEM is difficult, and the concepts can be hard to understand. For many students who are visual learners, hours-long lectures, textbooks, and written notes don’t always cut it. By building a platform that can create visual animations along with voice explanations and a chatbot tutor, we hope to make education more accessible.
Ryan: What makes Opennote different from other note-taking apps?
Khiet: This is a great question, because we want to make it clear that Opennote is not a note-taking app. Rather, it’s a revolutionary way for students to study and learn from the notes they’ve already taken. Unlike conventional note-taking apps which merely capture and store information, Opennote utilizes users’ notes to generate custom animations and train an AI tutor that enhances users’ understanding of the material.
Ryan: This is a great idea, and I’m even more impressed that you managed to develop such an innovative program given the tight time frame. Can you walk us through the process of developing Opennote during the hackathon?
Abhi: Working off our initial plan for the app, we went with the route of familiarity and cognitive ergonomics, opting for an interface resembling the YouTube UI with added functionality for file uploads and chatting. Our focus was primarily on the development of the AI pipeline, which linked 5 LLM instances together to process handwritten documents, generate robust code, debug that same code to guarantee that we’d never run into an error (by implementing a custom closed-feedback loop), generating text-to-speech content, and finally tying it all together by using ffmpeg to stream video bytes together before they’re sent back to the frontend.
This was an absolute feat to take on, and it ended up being many of our team’s first all-nighters. But being able to pitch the app and get the chance to display content from nothing but text in such a unique way was incredibly rewarding.
Ryan: What role did each of you play in the development of Opennote?
Anne: My main contributions involved marketing, outreach, and data privacy. Prior to the hackathon, I interviewed fellow STEM students and my former UCLA computer science professor. Their responses not only informed our development by influencing which features we prioritized, but also assisted with our business pitch during judging. Throughout the hackathon, I continued to work on our marketing approach to make our idea memorable and easy to understand.
I also emphasized data privacy in Opennote by keeping our developers accountable and transparently informing our users of their rights. It was important to me to integrate this from the very beginning. Alongside my team members, I added to our team’s prompt engineering techniques by introducing manual chain-of-thought prompting and one-shot learning and brainstormed UI/UX features for our website’s design.
Khiet: Before the hackathon, I conducted interviews with friends and peers from colleges nationwide to get an understanding of the current methods students were using to study with their notes. Most of the responses indicated that students wish there was a cleaner, more visual way to organize and view notes—especially when the content revolves around complex 3D-graphs and diagrams. These responses laid the foundation for how we wanted to approach Opennote.
I focused on learning TailwindCSS to help brainstorm and develop the UI/UX of Opennote. I drew some of the doodles and created the hand-drawn animation for the landing page from scratch. As for the backend, I helped with creating and revising the prompt engineering to train our AI.
Afterwards, I designed Opennote’s banner and further revised the prompt. Furthermore, many responses from non-STEM interviewees indicated those students also wished for ways to visually organize the data into things like flow charts and venn diagrams. These responses allowed us a clearer vision of how to expand Opennote.
Abhi: I worked extensively with the backend engineering. I set up the AI pipelines, determined the best prompts and formats to use for coaxing the LLMs to learn from their past generations and chats, and set up a clean user flow with multiple spaces, authentication, and different applet integrations on an extensively actionable UI to make it familiar to all users.
Rishi: I worked primarily with the frontend development, developing the landing page, the layout for all pages, and the UI elements of the site. I also worked on the design language of the project as a whole. I was also involved with the UI/UX engineering, the integration between the frontend and backend technologies for different tools, and the planning and implementation of the user flow to maximize accessibility and ease of use.
Ryan: What are your immediate next steps for Opennote, and do you plan to scale your business moving forward?
Khiet: Since this is our first time launching a product, we are reaching out to as many people as possible to pitch Opennote and are researching and learning from previous successful company launches. In terms of our product, we are in the process of polishing Opennote’s functionality to optimize user experience. We plan to grow our business by networking, utilizing social media accounts, and tailoring Opennote to students.
Abhi: We’re also setting up meetings with some investors as well as working on social media marketing by developing sizzle reels and other advertisements to grow our user base.
Anne: To scale and grow our business, we plan to enhance Opennote’s technical capabilities and broaden its accessibility. Technical goals include optimizing backend requests, implementing MANIM auto-recompile correction to ensure smoother and more efficient performance, and building our smart code-generation AI systems into a set of models that are less prone to code hallucinations. We also hope to extend Opennote’s functionality by incorporating summaries with key concepts at the end of each generated video and by expanding its focus to include more disciplines with advanced visualizations like tables, Venn diagrams, and flow charts.
On a broader scale, we aim to promote inclusivity by making Opennote available in multiple languages, adding subtitles, and providing additional resources with each animation, such as flashcards or links to online resources. Overall, we aspire to create a more comprehensive educational tool that meets the diverse needs of our users.
Ryan: What are your long-term goals, both for Opennote and for your careers?
Khiet: In terms of goals for Opennote, I hope to successfully launch it by collaborating with my teammates on refining and pitching it; it’s exciting to use our passion to create products that can impact others.
Opennote has been a foundational experience for my career, deepening my full-stack development skills and highlighting the importance of debugging and patience. More importantly, Opennote reflects my passion for CS. Just by working on Opennote, I’ve learned new terms, software, and concepts and had to apply them immediately before moving on to the next step to learn more. This iterative learning cycle is what I love about CS and it has helped me grow as an engineer and person.
Abhi: For Opennote, I’m excited to see us expand our services for an extensive user base and be able to help students not only in the US but internationally as well. I’ve had an amazing time working on integration of frontend and backend development, and that’s something I’d love the chance to pursue in the future as well.
Additionally, I’ve learned a lot about LLM architecture, prompt engineering, fine-tuning and multiprocessing, and weights and vector databases while developing our rating and fine tuning algorithms in preparation for Opennote’s Open Beta release. Going down the route of scientific computing and AI/ML research would be an absolute dream come true.
Lastly, I’ve worked extensively with embedded systems software and low level computing, and being able to combine that with the code generation algorithms we’re developing in-house here at Opennote is something I’m incredibly interested in pursuing once Opennote gets further off the ground.
Rishi: I’m really looking forward to scaling Opennote’s services to accommodate more users and adding more features to the platform to make the user experience as robust as possible. Being able to work with a close, dedicated team and ship features we’re all proud of has been a fantastic experience, and it’s something I aim to do in the future as well.
Over the course of development, working with different integrations and learning new techniques for UX/UI that I can apply to my frontend development has been an amazing experience and something that I’m really interested in. Also, working with different AI models and learning how to fine-tune them for specific use cases has been really interesting and is something I’d be ecstatic to work with in the future.
Ryan: What have been the most valuable lessons you’ve learned from this experience?
Anne: I’ve learned that working on a startup or small business requires initiative, dedication, and a vision. Success depends on maintaining a strong commitment despite the inevitable setbacks.
Abhi: I’ve grown tenfold as a software engineer both on backend and frontend development through this process. On any given day, I’d find myself implementing CSS renderers for rich text LLM responses and then switching to the other side of the software stack to set up API routes, payment verification, and user authentication. Working with poor documentation, trivial web development topics, and many many HTTP requests has not only taught me a great deal about their intricacies but also about how to persevere and find joy in the work that you’re doing every day.
Rishi: With such a large undertaking, I’ve learned a lot technically about managing an application and expanding my range as a developer from strictly frontend to working with different integrations and being able to ship full features from scratch on a daily basis. But beyond just development, I’ve learned quite a bit about what is required to pitch an idea and make it marketable and have user appeal. An app can be cool to its creators, but at the end of the day, the users are what make the app successful. Learning how to pitch, market, and finance the app and its different technology integrations has been a huge part of my growth as part of the Opennote team.
On a more macro scale, I’ve realized that working with a small team towards such a lofty goal with relatively little experience can be really daunting and comes with a lot of challenges and roadblocks. But I’ve learned that the most important way to grow as a business and as an individual is to treat all of these mishaps as learning opportunities for bigger growth to come.
Visit the Opennote website to learn more, and consider joining their beta.
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