Need 2 Know

A chrome extension and web app for investors and the general public to sentimentally/politically analyze articles.

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Inspiration

We wanted to allow financial investors and people of political backgrounds to save valuable time reading financial and political articles by showing them what truly matters in the article, while highlighting the author's personal sentimental/political biases. We also wanted to promote objectivity and news literacy in the general public by making them aware of syntax and vocabulary manipulation. We hope that others are inspired to be more critical of wording and truly see the real news behind the sentiment -- especially considering today's current events.

What it does

Using Indico's machine learning textual analysis API, we created a Google Chrome extension and web application that allows users to analyze financial/news articles for political bias, sentiment, positivity, and significant keywords. Based on a short glance on our visualized data, users can immediately gauge if the article is worth further reading in their valuable time based on their own views. The Google Chrome extension allows users to analyze their articles in real-time, with a single button press, popping up a minimalistic window with visualized data. The web application allows users to more thoroughly analyze their articles, adding highlights to keywords in the article on top of the previous functions so users can get to reading the most important parts. Though there is a possibilitiy of opening this to the general public, we see tremendous opportunity in the financial and political sector in optimizing time and wording.

How we built it

We used Indico's machine learning textual analysis API, React, NodeJS, JavaScript, MongoDB, HTML5, and CSS3 to create the Google Chrome Extension, web application, back-end server, and database.

Challenges we ran into

Surprisingly, one of the more challenging parts was implementing a performant Chrome extension. Design patterns we knew had to be put aside to follow a specific one, to which we gradually aligned with. It was overall a good experience using Google's APIs.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are especially proud of being able to launch a minimalist Google Chrome Extension in tandem with a web application, allowing users to either analyze news articles at their leisure, or in a more professional degree. We reached more than several of our stretch goals, and couldn't have done it without the amazing team dynamic we had.

What we learned

Trusting your teammates to tackle goals they never did before, understanding compromise, and putting the team ahead of personal views was what made this Hackathon one of the most memorable for everyone. Emotional intelligence played just as an important a role as technical intelligence, and we learned all the better how rewarding and exciting it can be when everyone's rowing in the same direction.

What's next for Need 2 Know

We would like to consider what we have now as a proof of concept. There is so much growing potential, and we hope to further work together in making a more professional product capable of automatically parsing entire sites, detecting new articles in real-time, working with big data to visualize news sites differences/biases, topic-centric analysis, and more. Working on this product has been a real eye-opener, and we're excited for the future.

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