Meet Edith, the AI-powered schedule assistant designed to reduce your stress

Shubh Thorat has a lot on his plate. In less than two years at Khoury College, the 19-year-old has already been involved with two start ups — SocialCloud and A Will To Live — while pursuing a bachelor’s in computer science with a concentration in AI/machine learning and a minor in business administration, which he plans to complete in just three years. Each day contains a whirl of projects; in fact, on the first day of the 2023 HackHarvard hackathon, where he and his team won the Terra API Prize, Thorat was also taking his “Algorithms and Data” midterm.

Is it any surprise that his prize-winning project, Edith, is an intelligent, highly integrated way to plan his days?

Edith is the intelligent calendar Thorat and his teammates developed at HackHarvard. The program integrates data from wearable tech to plan users’ schedules in the healthiest and most efficient way possible. Edith supports integrations with ChatGPT, Spotify, Canvas, Blackboard, Headspace, Horoscope weather applications, and Terra, the integrative health tech API that sponsored the prize. Edith’s adaptive and predictive capabilities grow more refined the longer it’s used. The ultimate vision is an AI calendar acting as a full-time personal assistant, organizing the user’s schedule to support their mood and managing stress by drawing connections between the data that other tools already collect.

“If you feel stressed, Edith notices that trend, assigns the task a stress level, and lines up a less stressful event right after to ensure that your stress level never exceeds a certain point,” Thorat explained.

For example, if Edith noticed a certain class in a user’s schedule regularly correlated with increased stress scores on their FitBit, it might schedule the user a visit to the gym immediately afterwards, prompt the user to open the Headspace meditation app, or suggest a calming Spotify playlist.

“Edith schedules everything accordingly, so that you know that you’re going to do it in the most productive way possible,” Thorat said.

The idea first came to Thorat while working on a calendar program for his “Object-Oriented Design” class. He’d been interested in building out a full-fledged intelligent calendar ever since, but a good opportunity didn’t present itself until HackHarvard. Thorat found his three teammates — Siddhartha Reddy Pullannagari of the University of Missouri–Saint Louis, Arnab Das Utsa of Stockton University, and Tai “JJ” Jun Jie of Stanford University — through the hackathon’s Discord server, selecting for curious and passionate students with a wide range of skills.

“Siddhartha was the API cracker; he spearheaded a lot of the API integration efforts. Arnab was the shadow worker in the group, who acted as a wall in times of stress for the group to feel comfortable. JJ was the hands at work behind the prototype, to make it exactly like our vision — or at least perfect for the presentation,” Thorat said. “I was the closer; my main job was bringing all aspects of the project together, perfecting … the UI/UX to showcase it as a product of the future.”

In spite of Thorat’s ironic scheduling conflict, the team buckled down for the 36 hours of the hackathon. They integrated five different APIs, built a sleek user interface, developed an algorithm to send users tailored schedule suggestions, and created branding and a promotional video for Edith.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lz_RuTefnO0
Voiced by Gülce Apaydın.

“Most of the skills I used were from ‘Organizational Behavior’ with Heatherjean MacNeil. I would highly recommend it to all CS majors struggling to have good partner projects,” Thorat said of the course offered by the D’Amore McKim School of Business. “This taught me how to create a safe and understanding environment for everyone’s opinion to be heard equally. Coupled with the partnership working ethics set by Khoury College during my first year, it truly allowed me to work well in a group setting on a coding project.”

Edith made it through two rounds of judging, but the group didn’t have time to present to the third round of judges. Thorat was pleasantly surprised, then, when HackHarvard announced that Edith had won the Terra API Prize, given to the project that best embodies sponsor Terra’s vision of cohesively integrating apps and services into wearable technology.

“I was confused for a second, and then I was like, ‘That’s us!’” Thorat said. “It was a good moment.”

While the group would like to eventually transition Edith into a fully fledged startup, the four group members are currently focused on school and don’t have a set timeline for further development. For his part,Thorat still has a long list of lofty goals, but Edith represents the culmination of one very specific dream — to walk in the footsteps of the superhero Iron Man.

“The name is inspired by the Marvel movie Avengers: Age of Ultron, in which Tony Stark has an AI companion called Edith,” Thorat said. “I promised myself when I saw that movie at 13 or 14 years old that I had to name my AI Edith.”

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