Help Me Rob

Inspiration / What It Does

While map visualizations give an overall view of open data such as crimes and property values, it lacks a human element: I wanted to have fun exploring these statistics in real time. That's how Help Me Rob was born. By combining chat bots with the OpenDataPhilly project, the user can enter a location and act as a robber. The app selects three of the most likely houses to be vulnerable based on a number of factors and reports how often home invasions takes place in that area.

How I built it

I used the Facebook Graph and Messenger API to send and receive messages from the chat bot. The data for home prices and crimes comes from the OpenDataPhilly APIs. The conversational processing was powered by wit.ai and is run off a Heroku node instance.

What's next for Help Me Rob

Improve the types of formatted output possible and flesh out the house selection algorithm to take into more properties.

Built With

• graph-api
• javascript
• messenger-api
• openphillydata
• wit.ai