Carita

Inspiration

Carita was conceived as a way to shed light on important philanthropic efforts that an ordinary Chrome user might never hear about. The power of data collection can be harnessed for good and that is what Carita seeks to do.

What it does

Carita parses through browsing history in order to find charities that relate to your interests

How we built it

We used Chrome Extensions to get a user's history, which is sent to a Node JS server which parses through a list of charities and returns the most relevant 3. This information is displayed through the Chrome Extension using HTML/CSS and JavaScript.

Challenges we ran into

Accessing user history for parsing. Optimal method for ranking charities Acquiring and storing charity information

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The whole thing

What we learned

How to write Chrome Extensions Parsing JSON Handling frontend and backend JavaScript

What's next for Carita

Expanding our charity database, adding verification features, geo-location to bring attention to local charities

Built With

capital-one-api
chrome
html/css
javascript

Submitted to

TartanHacks 2017
- Winner Capital One "Best Usage of the Capital One API"
- Winner Bloomberg

Created by

I came up with the idea for Carita while thinking of how data could be used for societal good. I designed the front-end interface using HTML/CSS and Javascript. First time using Javascript, but quite the learning experience.

Jeremy Meola
I worked on the main algorithm to find relevant matches between the user's browser history and charitable organizations.
I also worked on the database side, both in MS Access, and then on finally storing it in the form of JSON objects.

Shreyan Bakshi
I worked on the backend for Carita, using Node.JS, and integrated the Capital One API to transfer money between accounts corresponding to the amount donated in the extension.

Ajay Kumar
Carnegie Mellon University | Computer Science and Machine Learning
I worked to create that database of charitable organizations that Carita recommends to the end user. The relational database links a charity to an overarching focus and then associates each charity with a variety of key words that are compared to a user's internet activity in order to recommend a charity to the user.

John Jankowski