Dylan Clements

About

Welcome to my personal website! I'm Dylan Clements, a Computer Science major at Clark University with a minor in Political Science, interested in creative problem-solving and human-centered technology.

I am a Student Researcher in Clark University's Human-Computer Interaction Lab, working on Generative AI applications in accessibility, content creation, and social media.

Outside of academics, I enjoy Golf, Skiing, Ultimate Frisbee, Disc Golf, International Politics, History, Philosophy, Film, Personal Coding Projects, and Hackathons! I'm the president of the ACM Chapter at Clark, a member of the Clark Community Computing Club, and a player on Clark Ultimate Frisbee.

Feel free to explore my projects and recent updates below, and don't hesitate to reach out via the social links above!

Recent Updates

December 11, 2025

Built and Presented an IoT Plant Care System

For my final project for my IoT course, I designed a networked plant auto-waterer with water-source emptiness detection. My system monitors soil moisture, delivering water with a pump if the soil is dry, it also monitors the water level of whatever reservoir the user is using, if it gets too low to water it will use a LED to alert the user to fill it. Users can check the live soil moisture and water level at any time on a website. I got the opportunity to present my project to my classmates and several professors from the Computer Science department through a slideshow and live demo,and I also created an Instructable so others can build their own! This was an absolute blast to build and I learned a lot about motors, relays, and networking with microcontrollers!

November 9, 2025

Won 3rd Place at Clark Hackathon

I just competed in the Fall Hackathon at Clark University! I had the pleasure of working with my dedicated and talented teammates Charles VandenBosch, Noah Burd, and Elliot Edwards to make AutoBots, an online interface where users can create games and compete in one-on-one competitions by programming bots in Python to play against each other! The theme of the Hackathon was "hack your hobby", and we wanted to serve our hobby of programming with a fun, communal, and educational system like AutoBots. I was mainly focused on the backend throughout the weekend, working with Websockets to create real-time communication between users and the server, as well as integrating Pyodide to run user-submitted Python code in the browser sandbox on their end. A fun challenge was that since we were allowing users to make their own games and write their own bots we knew we could not allow that code to be ran on our server, nor on our user's devices. To solve this, users run their own bots on their machines, responding to the current game state when the server requests. The game logic is ran by the server in Piston, an external secure code execution engine, and the board front end for games is run isolated in an iframe. We ended up winning 3rd place overall out of 16 teams, and it was an incredible experience!

October 5, 2025

Competed in HackHarvard

I collaborated with my exceptional teammates Christopher Siems, Torin Anderson, and Noah Burd to create Unity Notes, a decentralized peer-to-peer platform-agnostic community notes Chrome Extension! With media consolidation and misinformation on the rise, we wanted to build a system which brings control over knowledge transfer back to communities. Users can leave notes or get context by highlighting text on any webpage. Notes are not stored in the central server. Instead, the notes are stored locally on the users device, with the original statements and protocol to contact the notes authors stored in a vector database. When a user requests context for a statement, the vector database is used to identify users who have commented on relevant statements. The notes can then be retrieved directly with a peer to peer connection, and are then consolidated using an aggregation agent, and then displayed to the user. I was primarily responsible for the vector database using Qdrant and the integration of the Gemini API for embedding generation and note summarization. I had fun wokring on an additional feature that identifies multiple topics in a highlighted text and retrieves notes for each topic separately, allowing for more nuanced context retrieval. Overall, it was an amazing experience and I am looking forward to next year!

My Projects

Here are some of the projects I am most proud of!

AutoBots

Placed 3rd place out of 16 submissions at the 2025 Fall Clark hackathon! An online platform where users can create games and compete in one-on-one competitions by programming Python bots to play against each other using Python, JavaScript, FastAPI, React, Websockets, CodeMirror, Pyodide, Piston, and MongoDB. Our team was 4 people, I was primarily responsible for the backend, working with Websockets to create real-time communication between users and the server, integrating Pyodide to run user-submitted Python code in the browser sandbox on their end, and utilizing Piston to securely run user submitted game logic server-side.

GitHub Devpost

ClarkUltimate

I created clarkultimate.com, the official website for Clark University's Ultimate Frisbee team with my teammate. The website features information about the team, great photos, the current practice schedule, tournament sign ups, rosters, scores, the history of the club, and the team sign up. With an admin login system, future team captains can update the site easily with new practices, tournaments, rosters, and scores. The site is built using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and MongoDB for data storage.

Website GitHub

IoT Plant Care System

I designed a networked plant auto-waterer with water-source emptiness detection as my Internet of Things course final. My system monitors soil moisture, delivering water with a pump if the soil is dry, and also monitors the water level of whatever reservoir the user is using, if it gets too low to water it will use a LED to alert the user to fill it. Users can check the soil moisture and water level at any time on a website. I got the opportunity to present my project to my classmates and several professors from the Computer Science department through a slideshow and live demo, and I also created an Instructable so others can build their own!

Instructable Demo Slides

Unity Notes

A decentralized, peer-to-peer, platform-agnostic community notes system using JavaScript, SQLite, Qdrant, Python, and the Gemini api with a Chrome Extension frontend. Built in a 4 person team during HackHarvard 2025. I was responsible for the vector database using Qdrant and the integration of the Gemini API for embedding generation, note summarization, and multi-topic context retrieval.

GitHub Devpost Demo

CommUnity

A platform designed in a 4 person team during the 2024 Fall Clark hackathon for students to get experience relevant to their studies via local volunteer work using JavaScript, SQLite, Python, and the OpenAI api. I was largely responsible for the openai api powered search and tagging mechanism to match students with relevant volunteer opportunities.

GitHub Devpost

InnerCircle

A Chrome Extension to passively communicate emotion in groups with only emojis using JavaScript, SQLite, and Python built in a 4 person team during the 2025 Spring Clark hackathon. The hackathon theme was "communication beyond words", and we wanted to create a platform for people to easily express their emotions in group settings no matter the time or place. I was primarily reesponsible for the backend, using Python, Flask, and SQLite to create a secure login and group joining system as well as storing and retrieving user emoji and group membership.

GitHub

LeafyLessons

This project enables Worcester residents to see their location on both the heat and tree coverage maps, allowing them to visualize the tree coverage situation in their neighborhood and the negative effects it is having on their quality of life and the environment as a whole. Our program also provides information to users on how to utilize Worcester City resources to plant trees in public spaces and get in touch with their representatives to support policies to protect and grow tree coverage in Worcester. Built using Python, ipapi, and tkinter in a 2 person team during the 2024 Spring Clark hackathon.

GitHub Devpost