SEAS students develop customized videoconferencing platform
As the U.S. COVID-19 crisis intensified in early March, Harvard Undergraduate Capital Partners (HUCP) was hit by a bevy of networking event cancellations. When Harvard President Larry Bacow announced that the University would transition to remote teaching after spring break, HUCP managing director Bryan Lee ’21, a computer science concentrator at the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, wondered how networking events could continue with participants scattered around the world. He immediately reached out to some friends and began brainstorming solutions. “We started to think about the sorts of things that happen during networking events that aren’t well-facilitated through Zoom [the videoconferencing platform Harvard uses],” said Jacob Ajit ’21, an economics and computer science concentrator. “For instance, at networking events, you have conversations that self-segregate into little sub-groups, which we thought of as ‘rooms.’ The key point is that they are very dynamic. We wanted to create an interface where...