Amherst Lost & Found

🧥 The Beginning: A Lost Coat, Some Water Bottles, and an Idea It all started when I lost my coat and water bottles.

I searched everywhere—dorm lounges, classrooms, dining halls—but had no luck. There was no organized system to check where lost items were, no clear way to report something missing, and no map or image to help identify things. It was frustrating.

That frustration sparked an idea: What if I could build a better lost and found system—one that used AI, maps, and filters to help students find what they lost, fast?

🧠 Lessons Learned This project taught me everything—seriously. From coming up with the idea to deploying it online, I had to learn a wide range of skills:

💡 Idea Generation: Identifying a real problem and thinking about how tech could solve it.

🧱 Django Framework: Creating models, views, templates, and routes for a functioning web app.

🖼️ AI + Image Recognition: Integrating a model to auto-detect the type of item from uploaded images.

🗺️ Mapping with Leaflet.js: Displaying where items were found and dropped off.

🎨 User Interface Design: Making the app clean, accessible, and easy to navigate.

🔧 How I Built It Backend: Django (Python)

Frontend: HTML, CSS, Bootstrap, JavaScript

Database: SQLite

Image Recognition: TensorFlow with MobileNet

Map Integration: Leaflet.js + OpenStreetMap

Key Features Image upload and automatic item classification

Map with location pins for where items were found

Filters by category, date, and location

Item list with detailed info (photo, found location, drop-off point, time)

🚧 Challenges Connecting AI to Django: Making the image recognition work smoothly inside a Django project was new territory.

UI/UX: I had to constantly ask, Would someone who just lost their coat know how to use this?

Database Design: Getting the structure right for filtering and search was a puzzle.

🌟 Looking Back Losing my coat was annoying—but it led to something cool. Now, I’ve built something that could help other students avoid that same frustration. That feels like a win.