Project Everest

We made a platform to address 3 major topics combating human trafficking: Reporting, Personal Safety, and Analysis

Comment

Inspiration

We wanted to take on a social challenge we have not done before and educate ourselves on this topic where I believe our skills can help tackle these problems.

What it does

Our team decided to create an entire platform combating human trafficking on a professional app development scale. Our goal was not to create a hackathon application with static data that has very little functionality and aesthetics. Instead, we decided to create a full-fledged app with the highest attention to material design and usability to create a functioning platform. Our app is powered by a realtime database constantly listening for crowd-sourced updates to power this platform and consists of over 3000 lines of code in only 31 hours, two hours for a nap of course. We have three parts to our platform. First, you must sign up. We handle authentication firebase. This is important because one part of our application is a crowd-sourced reporting tool that allows people to report and label suspicious activities. We didn’t want to only source data and graph the data. Instead, we want to create the data pipelines empowering many of the projects we have and will see today. Law enforcement has access to this open source and we plan to aggregate common reports and highlight them using different visual cues. Moreover, since we have an option for route reporting and Google Maps has transit information, we store information about potential routes a trafficker may be reporting if the transit report is near a bus station or metro, and this data is all saved on firebase.

The second part of this application is a tool for people like you and me. After spending time researching human trafficking, we’ve found that many people are simply abducted in the streets on their way to a destination, and we believe we can fix this. That’s why we offer a solution to route a plan to your destination and strategically place way points where and when you are expected to be. If you’re not in that waypoint, we ask you to enter the pin you signed up with. If you do not enter the pin or enter the pin incorrectly after a set period of time, we call the SendPolice API which asks your name and meta data about you that we collected during sign up, your location, and can send police to the last location we’ve recorded for you. We believe this will help an incredible amount because you can easily set waypoints, allow geo-fencing technology to do its job, ensure you’ve arrived safely. You can always remove these points in your profile as we can save the route you’ve chosen and waypoints in firebase for you to view at a later date.

Finally, we have a social exploration tool that allows you to search selected street terms given to us on slack and runs IBM watson to analyze the sentiment, keywords, categorical classifications and entities associated with these tweets. We then display the data in graph libraries for an ease understanding of the data we’ve scraped and processed. In the future, we plan to cross reference the social profiles and handles with the Duns and Bradstreet social media API to locate people who are tweeting items that are on par with dangerous tweets.

The best part is this is all on a phone. It’s a ubiquitous device that nearly every person has. Our tools to report activities, ensure safe travel individually, and analyze social trends is something we are very proud to have accomplished in the last 33 hours. It has taken an incredible amount of work to create this platform that addresses 3 big topics: Grassroots reporting, personal safety, and social analysis and we hope you enjoy our project.

How I built it

We built it with the technologies tagged and very little sleep

Challenges I ran into

The breadth of the project creeped out from under us. Moreover, we keep running into strange bugs that crash the app with no useful information on what is causing it. After several hours of research, we believe that it's because we're using two map fragments inside an application and Google has not gotten around to fixing this issue.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We have created this tool with a professional, material design. It's incredibly hard to spend time designing your application in addition to the scraping of the material and we believe we married these topics well.

Moreover, we're excited about the amount of work we did. I think we were in over are heads to begin with but we bunkered down in order to achieve what we set our minds to do.

What I learned

I learned a ton about human trafficking and how we can use technologies to create powerful and empowering platforms to defeat the obstacles facing this issue.

What's next for Project Everest

We need to add a test suite for our application and finish up some of the bugs we've encountered such as the one I mentioned above. Finally, we want to do more complex cross validation of APIs across different datasets and I believe that would be a very fun challenge.

Share this project:

Updates