Concentrate

The Project

Concentrate is a chrome extension that aims to block distracting websites via detecting, analyzing, and blocking the websites intelligently. Under the help of advanced NLP algorithm and smooth communications from frontend and backend, Concentrate is able to perform this process effectively and efficiently. It is still an evolving project, with many features under active development (e.g. better and more responsive user interface, asynchronous web server, more accurate blocking results).

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Team Comments

Personally, I often suffer from constant distractions from websites I love to visit. For this reason, I'm inspired to create Concentrate to block distracting websites via a technical approach.

I found it especially difficult to discover and make use of an efficient text summarization algorithm in an effort to draw accurate summaries from the given web data. I ultimately decided on the use of cosine similarity after comparing multiple algorithms.

I would add a login/signup system for better user experience. I would also add a threshold checking mechanism (if the keyword frequency exceeds 5%, then block the page) to ensure the accuracy of website blocking. I may also switch from Flask to FastAPI for better backend performance.