BrainBrew

Academic Mission Control for Students

BrainBrew turns a fragmented semester into a reasoning system.

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Overview

Students rarely fail because information is unavailable.

They fail because the semester is fragmented across:

• course pages
• assignments
• notes
• syllabi
• deadlines
• mental overhead

BrainBrew is the layer above that chaos. It helps a student understand:

• what matters now
• what is actually at risk
• which concept gaps are causing the risk
• what study action to take next

This is not a generic study chatbot. It is an academic workflow system built around reasoning, triage, and intervention.

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Product Preview

Command Center • Assignment Recovery • Semester-Aware Chat • Study Mission Lab

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What BrainBrew Does

Command Center

• surfaces urgent work across the semester
• flags at-risk assignments
• shows readiness and remediation paths

Knowledge Graph

• maps concepts across courses
• exposes weak areas before exams make them obvious
• connects assignment risk back to missing understanding

Study Mission Lab

• generates quizzes, flashcards, and study guides
• grounds outputs in course context instead of generic prompts
• supports read-aloud and voice interaction

University + Transcript Ingestion

• searches universities
• pulls official university metadata
• imports transcripts
• matches coursework against official catalogs

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Why It Feels Different

Most academic AI tools stop at chat, summaries, or note cleanup.

BrainBrew goes further by reasoning over:

• the student’s current courses
• upcoming deadlines
• remediation state
• concept mastery
• imported academic history

The result is a product that behaves more like academic mission control than a single assistant window.

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AI Stack

Primary Reasoning

• K2 Think V2

Used for:

• semester-aware chat
• study guide generation
• flashcard generation
• quiz generation
• concept extraction
• topic-level academic reasoning

Fallback Inference

• Google Gemini

Used when K2 is unavailable during generation flows.

Voice Stack

• ElevenLabs for primary text-to-speech
• Kokoro-82M as fallback TTS
• backend speech transcription via ElevenLabs

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Platforms

Web

• React
• TypeScript
• Vite
• Zustand
• Framer Motion

Backend

• Python
• FastAPI
• Uvicorn

iOS

• Swift
• SwiftUI
• AVFoundation

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Demo Context

The current demo dataset is built around a realistic graduate computer science semester:

• 16:198:513 Design and Analysis of Data Structures and Algorithms
• 16:198:518 Operating Systems Design
• 16:198:533 Natural Language Processing
• 16:198:536 Machine Learning

Rutgers is the current showcase context, but the product direction is broader: BrainBrew is designed as a general academic workflow layer for students navigating dense, multi-course semesters.

Live deployment:

• Web: https://brain-brew.us
• API: https://api.brain-brew.us

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Architecture

flowchart LR
    A[Student] --> B[BrainBrew Web or iOS]
    B --> C[Command Center]
    B --> D[Study Mission Lab]
    B --> E[Knowledge Graph]
    B --> F[Profile / Transcript Import]

    C --> G[FastAPI Backend]
    D --> G
    E --> G
    F --> G

    G --> H[K2 Think V2]
    G --> I[Gemini Fallback]
    G --> J[ElevenLabs]
    G --> K[Kokoro Fallback]
    G --> L[Official University Sources]
    G --> M[Demo Semester Data]

    H --> N[Semester-Aware Reasoning]
    I --> N
    J --> O[Primary Voice Output]
    K --> O
    L --> P[University Search / Catalog Matching]
    M --> Q[Courses / Assignments / Concepts]

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Deployment

Hosted on:

• Render

Domain managed on:

• Porkbun

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Local Development

Backend

Create backend/.env:

K2_API_KEY=your_k2_key_here
ENABLE_GEMINI_FALLBACK=true
GEMINI_API_KEY=your_gemini_key_here
ELEVENLABS_API_KEY=your_elevenlabs_key_here
ELEVENLABS_VOICE_ID=21m00Tcm4TlvDq8ikWAM
ELEVENLABS_TTS_MODEL=eleven_turbo_v2_5
KOKORO_VOICE=af_heart
KOKORO_LANG_CODE=a
KOKORO_SPEED=1.0
HF_TOKEN=your_huggingface_token_here

Run:

cd backend
pip install -r requirements.txt
python run.py

Frontend

Create frontend/.env if needed:

VITE_API_BASE_URL=http://localhost:8000/api

Run:

cd frontend
npm install
npm run dev

iOS

See IOS_APP/README.md.

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Team

• Varesh Patel
• Aparajita Sarkar
• Sinchana S Arun

Built for HackPrinceton 2026.

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One-Line Summary

BrainBrew turns academic chaos into a system that can reason, prioritize, and respond.