Hack Harvard 2016 Submission
Built by: Jason Rametta, Hassan Ali, Austin Hubbell & Dhron Joshi
How financially literate are you? Are you comfortable investing your own money, or do you let it slowly fade away in management fees and nickel-and-dime savings accounts? Global financial literacy tests show that just 57% of adults in the U.S. are financially literate, so if you’re not informed with your money, you’re definitely not alone!
We created Switter to give everyday people the chance to explore, experiment and ultimately educate themselves on the topic of investing, without risking any of their hard-earned cash. To a lot of people investing seems like magic and so far removed from their daily lives that it would be impossible to learn. We disagree.
Switter is a platform for financial exploration. It combines live data from social media feeds with cutting edge machine learning to display public opinion (sentiment) about publicly listed companies. Here’s how it works:
- Enter the company name/ticker that you are interested in
- The system analyses social media posts relating to those companies, and shows a statistical analysis of the public opinion around them
- You can then compare the historic prices with the public opinion at the time, and decided whether or not to invest
- You have just completed your first financial experiment!
Our team met for the first time ever at Hack Harvard, and we all had similar goals: build a challenging technology project that could help people connect with and learn about traditionally disconnected topics. We were lucky enough to have complimenting skill sets and were able to split the project into two major parts and get to work quickly.
The visual interface was built almost entirely from scratch with ReactJS & Redux. The database and API technologies were built with NodeJS, ExpressJS and MongoDB and leveraged technology from HP, Twitter, Yahoo and more.
- The backend repository
- The DevPost Submission to Harvard