ImmuneNews.space

Reading the news today might make you think that Covid-19 is all that's happening. ImmuneNews filters out articles that it believes are about coronavirus to give you a less saturated newsfeed.

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Inspiration

A couple of weeks ago, our team spent the week clearing out our flat in Edinburgh as our lease was coming to the end. During the time spent there, we didn't watch any TV or listen to any radio. This short break away from the media helped us to briefly forget about the global pandemic, isolation, and Covid-19 as a whole; we noticed our attitudes and general mental health greatly benefitting from it. This feeling gave way to an idea. We should be able to read the news without the over-saturation of virus based articles. It can sometimes feel impossible to stay up to date on current affairs without being constantly reminded that we're living through a global pandemic. ImmuneNews helps you briefly escape it.

What it does

ImmuneNews gathers news from multiple news sources and only shows you articles that are determined to be virus-free: immune articles.

How we built it

We used News API to access live news articles in a JSON format. These were then filtered by checking for banned words (coronavirus, covid-19, virus etc.) in the title and first 200 characters of the article. We then built a website using flask on which you can browse recent immune articles. This site was then hosted using Google Cloud on a custom domain.

Challenges we ran into

Initially our hope was to use the Google Cloud NLP API to determine not only whether or not an article was related to Coronavirus but whether or not it was a positive news article. Given our time frame we decided to start with a naive implementation and build on it later. We were surpised by how successful the naive implementation was at filtering out coronavirus articles effectively so decided to leave it as is.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

This was the 2nd website we had made and despite its simple interface we are pleased with the results and what we achieved as a pair in 24 hours.

What we learned

Coming from a backend background we both learnt lots about frontend web development. HTML and Javascript is new to both of us so learning and improving those skills has been a challenge but enjoyable.

What's next for ImmuneNews

There are many directions ImmuneNews could take. User inputs to choose category, date, source and authour would be the clear next steps to take to enhance the user experience. We would also like to implement determining whether or not the news is positive or not, this would involve getting stuck into the NLP API which we would be excited to do. We also want to explore using it to improve on our naive implementation which does still let articles related to Coronavirus slip through.

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