Cornell is home to over 1,000 student organizations and a hub for events throughout the year, making club fairs and listservs daunting for many students. Kai Keane ’14 and Joe Nelson ’14 came up with a solution, and are launching a mobile application this week to make navigating campus life easier.
The mobile app, called Agnes, acts as a centralized platform to keep students updated about events on college campuses across the United States, and “boasts the largest collection of events on and off campus, along with group profiles for all of Cornell’s student organizations,” Nelson said.
“As to how we’re gathering the data: essentially the same way you would go about finding every event you can if you were given the task to find all the everything available to you,” he added. “Except now only one person has to spend the time doing it. Most things are online, it’s just about finding all the scattered sources — it’s the ‘we’ll do the searching so you don’t have to’ approach.”
Agnes also offers a “complex proprietary recommendation algorithm that takes into account your interests, major and year and learns from the kind of events that you frequently like to go to,” Nelson said.
This feature will allow students to interact more personally with the app.
“You can follow and join groups and stay connected so that you’ll be up-to-date with their next performance, information session or general body meetings,” he said. “The beauty of a sophisticated matching algorithm is that we can take everything, cut through the clutter and deliver only what you, personally, are looking for on campus.”
The app also allows users to invite others to events and sync phone calendars so that students can receive alerts or notifications if the time or location of the event changes.
Currently, Agnes is operating at 20 universities in the Northeast region with over 7,000 events and 10,100 student organizations, according to Nelson. It will launch in Cornell this week as Nelson and Keane plan to further expand in 2018.