Lexbudget Chatbot Mission

Our mission is to improves accessibility, understanding, and engagement with the town budget for residents by implementing measures to simplify technical language, condense the document length, enhance digital accessibility features, provide historical data and comparisons, and establish clear avenues for community engagement and feedback. Second enhances transparency and community engagement in Lexington by utilizing AI-generated transcriptions from town meeting recordings to provide detailed insights, including key topics, time allocation, public comments, and feedback, thereby fostering a sense of community involvement and accountability. The implementation of a chatbot will further facilitate easy interaction, allowing residents to ask specific questions and receive prompt replies.

Link to LexBudget Chatbot

Project Team Members

Jerry Xu (Project Leader)

Kevin Zhu

Jasmine Gu

Justin Wang

Cassidy Xu

Emma He

William Yang

Andrew Pan

Joley Leung (Graphics)

Project Mentors

Andrei Radulescu-Banu is a Software Architect for self-driving cars, robotics, fintech, computer networks and other industries. He is co-founder of Analytiq Hub, where he develops tools to facilitate AI adoption in the Enterprise.

Chester Curme is a Senior Applied Science Manager at Microsoft, where he builds features backed by large language models into Microsoft products. Prior to Microsoft, Chester led teams of data scientists and machine learning engineers at Evisort Inc and Kensho Technologies. He holds a PhD in physics from Boston University.

Jeannie Lu is a Principal Software Engineer at Middleby, where she develops IoT solutions for commercial properties and connected kitchens. Prior to Middleby, she was a founding team member of Mazu Networks where she developed network infrastructure software. In her spare time, she volunteered as a FLL robotics coach in MIT Lincoln Lab's outreach program for 5 years.

John Truelove is the VP of Engineering at Bitsight, where he leads the development of a large-scale distributed system that measures businesses' cybersecurity posture. John joined Bitsight as its first engineer, and prior to that was a security researcher at MIT Lincoln Laboratory. John has degrees in computer engineering from Johns Hopkins and Carnegie Mellon.

Nagarjuna Venna is a Senior Lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management where he teaches classes in Entrepreneurship. He is the co-founder of BitSight, a security ratings company he co-founded in 2011. BitSight has pioneered a new market category and has grown to become a global organization with over 2,500 customers, 500+ employees, and 400M+ in venture funding. Nagarjuna served as the chief product officer and a board director from 2011 to 2020. Prior to BitSight, he co-founded Saperix, a risk management company, which was acquired by Firemon in 2011. He holds a Bachelor's in computer science and engineering from National Institute of Technology, Warangal, India and a Master's in engineering and management from MIT.

Neerja Bajaj is the VP of Product and Innovation at Brivo. She has taken many products from innovation to launch at both startups and Fortune 500 companies. She has also led digital transformations to address customer experience, operational efficiency and scale. She holds a Masters in Computer Science from University of Maryland.

Wei Ding has been a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts Boston since 2008. She served as a Program Director at the National Science Foundation's Division of Information Intelligent Systems from 2019 to 2023, She is an IEEE Fellow, AAIA Fellow, and ACM Senior Member.