CivicLens

Inspiration

Cities receive thousands of complaints, but most are handled as isolated tickets. We wanted to use AI to connect these signals and help cities understand what is actually going wrong and what needs attention first.

What it does

CivicLens lets citizens report infrastructure problems through photos or text. AI identifies the issue, estimates severity, detects duplicate reports, finds hotspots, prioritizes problems, and helps authorities track and verify resolutions.

How we built it

We built a web platform with a citizen reporting interface, an authority dashboard, geospatial mapping, and an AI pipeline for image analysis, NLP, issue clustering, severity scoring, and prioritization.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge was going beyond simple issue detection. We had to figure out how to combine multiple reports, location, history, and severity into meaningful infrastructure insights.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We transformed individual complaints into infrastructure intelligence—from detecting a problem to identifying hotspots and recommending what should be fixed first.

What we learned

We learned that effective AI isn't just about prediction. It is about connecting data, providing explanations, and helping people make better decisions.

What's next for CivicLens

We want to make CivicLens predictive by incorporating weather, traffic, infrastructure history, and sensor data to identify problems before they become crises.

Built With

• computer-vision
• express.js
• frontend:-react
• geospatial-clustering-maps-&-data:-mapbox
• mapbox-backend:-node.js
• natural-language-processing
• next.js
• postgresql-ai:-gemini-api
• tailwind-css