Meet Ian Johnson!
Ian took the lead in re-developing the desktop version of our J Street Reviews app and making it available over the internet for anyone to use. His hard work paid off and we now have a smart and sleek web application we can show off! Ian is continually making improvements to the J Street Reviews app. If you have any suggestions or feature requests, contact us today and let us know!
Microsoft takes the lead in AI investment
Fortune Magazine
Microsoft reportedly invested $10 billion in OpenAI, a leading AI development firm and the creator of the popular language model ChatGPT. The partnership aims to advance AI capabilities and could foster AI integration with Office applications, Azure cloud, and the Bing search engine. Exciting times for Microsoft!
The fire is crackling, the snow is falling, and you just grabbed your favorite snack from the pantry. It’s time to bundle up in your blanket and cozy up for a mid-winter movie night. You turn on your TV, but then comes the age-old question: “What do I watch tonight?”
We’re big movie buffs at J Street, so much so that we created a nifty tool to quickly answer that question. Years ago, we created an Access database for our team to add movies and TV shows they’ve been watching and rate their favorite flicks. We recently gave it a makeover and made it more accessible for everyone, by rewriting it as an ASP.Net MVC Core/SQL Server web application called J Street Reviews.
J Street Reviews uses IMDB’s database of thousands of movies to display data such as title, release year, MPAA rating, and a plot description. Each movie will also link to its page on IMDB for more information. We can rate movies (0-4), and one of the coolest parts of the application is the ability to calculate “affinity scores” between users. This score shows how closely a user’s preferences align with other reviewers by calculating the similarities in their scores for movies they’ve both reviewed. In this way, they can try to find titles that someone with a high affinity score rated highly. We’re also working on adding machine learning to predict a user’s score for every title in our database.
J Street Reviews showcases many of the same tools we build into all our web applications. For instance, it supports different permissions like Read Only and Admin. Anonymous (non-logged-in) users can visit the application, search movies, and see ratings in Read Only mode. Admins (the J Street team) are authenticated through a log-in screen which includes a standard password reset process. Admins enjoy extra permissions, such as adding ratings and titles, and activating/deactivating other users. The application offers several navigation links that take you to different areas of the application. The application is also mobile-friendly, so it can be used on tablets and phones as well as computers. And of course, it also includes a robust searching feature to quickly locate movies by title or release year.
We’re constantly adding ratings for new movies and shows we’re watching. What are some of your favorite movies or TV shows? Take a look at J Street Reviews and see what we think about them! You can find J Street Reviews under the Resources link on our website. Bookmark it so you never have to ask yourself what to watch again!