It’s a scary and exciting time to enter the tech industry. The next generation of open web builders is already stepping up. Right here in Monterey, they’re building real-world projects, contributing to open-source, and tackling some of the toughest problems facing the future of the web.
At this year’s California State University, Monterey Bay School of Computing and Design capstones celebration, I had the chance to reconnect with three student groups we supported at Mozilla. Each team built impressive projects in collaboration with Mozillians and members of the open-source community.
It’s clear how much care and dedication Bude Su and the faculty put into the capstone program and the students. The results speak for themselves.
These graduates are the next generation of open web stewards. They are stepping into a world where the web is rapidly evolving, and they’ll be working directly on the front lines of that transformation.
The student projects explored some of the most relevant areas in modern computing: context-aware web application interactions, private on-device machine learning, and local AI.
Web-Applets Exploration | Unternet 🌐
Team: Adrian Haro, Eli Kramer, Smirth Luciano Salinas, Enrique Rangel
This team explored Web Applets, a forward-thinking project sponsored by Mozilla Builders, led by Rupert Manfredi.
Web Applets are a new open specification that allows both humans and AI to interact with small, secure bundles of web code. The team was honored with a special award for their outstanding work! Nice job!
Firefox AI Platform: Recap 🦊
Team: Taimur Hasan, Kate Sawtell, Diego Valdez, Peter Mitchell
Under the leadership of Tarek Ziadé, with the support of Shruti Kamath and Joshua Lochner this group is doing wonders in the browser. Leveraging local llm’s with an experimental web extensions API and transformers.js, the students were able to build a Firefox add-on that helps people categorize and get insights from their browsing history privately. We hope to see it featured in the add-on store soon. 👏
Mozilla.ai Blueprints 🖨️
Teams: Maitreyi Gharat, Kenia Munoz-Ordaz
David Orona, Connor Bennett
Blueprints provide developers with workflows to build AI applications.
They’re extendable and open-source.
Both student projects created their own blueprints to share with the AI @ Mozilla community with the help of Kostis Saitas Zarkias, Alex Meckes, Stefan French and others.
Wireframes generates wireframes for your projects from sketches and prompts - all without using any cloud AI!
Document Parser converts a wide variety of documents into structured outputs you can use to search through them and uncover insights with natural language. Using local AI as well as OCR.