Apollo Rising

A student walks into Stuyvesant’s entrance and glances at the digital clock, which reads 7:58. “Oh no, I have drafting!” he exclaims. Rushing to the two-to-four escalator, he finds it broken. He sprints up the escalator stairs and to four-to-six. Not working. In his head, he curses out the school. He doesn’t want to risk it and run up from the sixth floor to the tenth. Gasping for breath as if he’d had just finished a marathon, he walks into her drafting class. The clock reads 8:03. “There goes today’s participation points,” he says. If only he had known which escalators were working, he would’ve been on time and not sweating profusely while trying to figure out how to draw an isometric circle. The Sophomore Caucus has come up with a solution to address this issue by introducing a new online program, dubbed Apollo, aimed at reducing the time students take to get to class every day. The program tracks escalators that are working and those that are not working by crowdsourcing students at Stuyvesant.

Sophomores Jesse Hall and Ivan Galakhov, Director of Information Technology for Sophomore Caucus and Assistant to the Director of Information Technology for Sophomore Caucus, respectively, created Apollo. Wearing Supreme tees and toting secondary computer bags, Hall and Galakhov sat down to explain the creation process behind Apollo.

While describing their role on Sophomore Caucus, Galakhov and Hall made it clear to me that though Hall held the position of Galakhov’s superior in the IT department, they operated more like co-directors. The two, who have been friends since middle school, explained how they both got into computer science. “English wasn't my first language. Coding kind of helped me without interacting with people. I am extremely antisocial,” Galakhov said.

“I am the social one of us. I have no reason why I got into computers. I've always had a way with computers,” said Hall, laughing with Galakhov.

“In middle school, Jesse was well known as a computer kid. I was the weird one that didn’t talk,” Galakhov added. They smiled at each other, seemingly reminiscing on middle school. Hall’s and Galakhov’s CS skills made them good choices to lead the Sophomore Caucus IT department.

Sophomore Caucus President Vishwaa Sofat tasked the two with the project. “Sophomore Caucus wanted us to do a hardware solution initially and then changed their minds and told us to shift their resources to an online crowdsourcing solution,” Hall said. Hall and Galakhov switched their focus from a ticketing program for SU that would help with school dances and other events to Apollo.

While Galakhov and Hall’s program is the first online solution, Apollo is not the first attempt at tracking working escalators. Krzysztof Hochlewicz (‘15) created a physical system to track the escalators in 2015. It involved “computer mice dangling down the escalators, and when sensors detected movements in the handrail, [the system] indicated that the escalator was [not] broken. It was the ugliest thing, and it was really delicate,” Hall described.

The Sophomore Caucus IT department was tasked with improving upon this system and chose to make it purely digital. Hall and Galakhov pulled up the program on their computers. “The emojis of up and down allow students to easily identify the escalators and choose up or down.” Hall pointed out. “A lot of what we have learned during the creation process is what's called ‘intuitive design.’ No one is going to read instructions, so it has to be completely idiot-proof. We've tested it on my little siblings, and they were able to use it.”

Apollo gives students the option to cast a vote for ‘Working’ and ‘Not Working,’ and the current state of the escalators determined by crowd-sourcing is displayed to the right.

“Even President Vishwaa was able to figure it out,” Hall tagged on with a chuckle.

Apollo’s simplistic layout lets students quickly view the condition of the escalators, and in addition to ‘working’ and ‘not working,’ there is ‘broken,’ which is manually put in by Hall and Galakhov.

“We have a bunch of math going on in the background that prevents random freshmen from spamming,” Hall joked.

“It's hard to topple,” Galakhov added. “If we see an influx of people voting, we can stagger it.” He wrote out the formula, f(x) = x-ln(x), which gives the weight of the vote, preventing a person from voting too much.

Hall and Galakhov plan on future updates for Apollo. “We are thinking of implementing a leaderboard that lets the votes of people who consistently give good information count more and vice versa; if people are consistently found to spam, their votes will be blocked, and their votes will be nulled by the system,” Hall said.

Response to Apollo has so far been positive. “We did the SU test, and it worked pretty well. Once we have it running, there is a concern that less and less people will use it, which is why we may implement the leaderboard system and give some weekly or monthly reward,” Galakhov said. Gifts such as Chipotle or iTunes gift cards are further incentives for students to cast their votes.

The link to Apollo can be accessed through a link in an e-mail sent to all Stuyvesant students and is available on iPhone and Androids. Hall and Galakhov scoffed at the concept of creating an app for the escalators. “Just pull up the link and save it to your screen,” they said.

Hall and Galakhov encourage students to send information about Apollo to them on potential improvements and updates.

Hall concluded, “Once this system is publicly deployed, I think it can have a positive impact on the student life of Stuyvesant and have a net effect of reducing stress on people.”