Kiran Giri

Bachelor of Science in Computer Science

Southwest Minnesota State University

I'm a Computer Science student at SMSU. My current capstone project is Campus Lost & Found, a mobile app I'm building for students to report and recover lost items.

The Problem

Campus lost-and-found usually lives on a bulletin board, in an email thread, or at a front desk. Students do not have one place to report an item, search what others posted, and message the person who lost or found it.

The Solution

Campus Lost & Found is a mobile app I'm building as my computer science capstone. Users can report lost and found items with optional photos, search and filter listings, see possible matches, message privately about a specific item, and mark an item recovered. It is a student project, not an official SMSU product.

Technical Approach

The app is React Native, Expo, and TypeScript. The Expo client talks directly to Firebase rather than a custom server: Authentication for email/password accounts and password reset, Cloud Firestore for items, conversations, messages, and in-app notifications, and Storage for photos. Chat uses Firestore listeners. Photos can be taken with the camera or chosen from the gallery.

Smart Matching

Matching runs on the device. It is a weighted comparison of report fields, not machine learning or image recognition. Pairs that reach a threshold of 40 are listed. Recovered and hidden items are excluded.

Category

40 points

Location

Up to 25 points

Keywords

Up to 20 points

Date

Up to 15 points

Challenges

Without a custom backend, auth, data, photos, chat, and notifications all go through the Firebase client SDK. I needed matching I could explain and demo, so I used an explicit point system instead of a black-box model. Keeping those flows in one Expo app was a large part of the work.

What I Learned

I learned how to wire a mobile client to Firebase Authentication, Firestore, and Storage, including live chat with listeners. I also learned when a simple client-side score is the honest approach: it is transparent, but it is not computer vision and it is not a production campus service.

Current Status

This is a student-built capstone prototype intended to run in Expo Go. Core flows are implemented: authentication, reports, photo uploads, search and filters, matching, private messaging, recovered status, and in-app notifications. It is not on the App Store or Google Play, and there is no hosted live demo.