MONITOR

Inspiration MONITOR started the morning of the Jewel City Hackathon. I woke up to a story about hackers in Los Angeles exposing vulnerabilities involving Flock camera infrastructure. Combined with the hackathon’s focus on City AI, cybersecurity, FireTEAM, and GCC, it immediately gave me an idea: what if we brought these systems together into one intelligent command center?

That idea is personal to me. I grew up experiencing homelessness, so community safety isn’t an abstract concept. I know what it feels like to depend on public systems, and I care deeply about building technology that makes communities safer while protecting privacy and accountability.

What I Built MONITOR is an all-in-one intelligence and operations platform designed to turn scattered information into actionable insight. It brings together cybersecurity, incidents, infrastructure, geographic intelligence, AI-assisted analysis, emergency information, reporting, and authorized sensor data in one environment.

Instead of asking, “How much information can we display?” I focused on a better question:

“What does someone need to know right now to make the right decision?”

How I Built It

I built MONITOR through rapid, AI-assisted development using a constant cycle:

Build → Test → Break → Diagnose → Improve → Repeat.

I also applied what I learned while red-teaming the City’s AI. Testing edge cases, conflicting information, location confusion, and authoritative-sounding incorrect answers taught me an important lesson: public technology doesn’t just need to work — it needs to fail safely.

Challenges & What I Learned

My biggest challenge was scope. Every feature connected naturally to another: maps connected to incidents, incidents to infrastructure, infrastructure to cybersecurity, and cybersecurity to AI analysis. MONITOR quickly became a system rather than a dashboard.

I’m still learning programming, and this project showed me something important about AI-assisted development: AI can generate code incredibly quickly, but humans still have to provide the vision, judgment, testing, ethics, and direction.

I came into this hackathon knowing I wasn’t the most experienced coder in the room.

So I didn’t try to be.

I focused on what I could bring: research, creativity, lived experience, systems thinking, relentless testing, and a clear idea of the problem I wanted to solve.

MONITOR is the result.