PurpleNoodles

PurpleNoodles helps businesses and organizations quickly and easily track sexual harassment within their workplace by detecting patterns in written and vocal conversations.

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Judging Criteria

Created: Jun 2, 2021 10:06 AM Created By: Michael Kougang Last Edited By: Michael Kougang Last Edited Time: Jun 6, 2021 8:55 AM

Inspiration

  • Our team wanted to address the amount of sexual harrassment in the workplace by focusing on gender equity and inclusion through a creative new idea.
  • We also wanted to address the challenge of integrating Google Cloud products in our project.

What it does

  • Our project addresses the challenge by providing an easy resource for workers to report instances of sexual harassment.
  • The app collects data of many kinds from the employee and recognizes patterns of verbal misbehavior in them. These reports are then accessed by the administration of the organization to aid them in tracking harassment of any kind.

How we built it

  • Our team used Google Cloud Natural Languange API to find instances of sexual harassment within text.
  • We also used Google Cloud Speech-to-Text API and Vision API to understand audio conversations, scanned documents, and photographed texts.
  • We deployed our project with Google Cloud using a domain name from GoDaddy Registry for ease of access.
  • We used CockroachDB Google Cloud Storage to store account information and harassment reports.
  • To create the website, we used Python and Flask for backend, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for frontend, and SQL for database storage.

Challenges we ran into

  • The biggest challenge that we ran in to was that we had never used any Google Cloud products before.
  • Also, we knew no SQL to create the database. By the end of the we were able to figure out how to use a few Google Cloud products and create databases with SQL.
  • Another great challenge we had to face was limited time due to the fact that one of us was hosting a workshop for kids and the other had to go to a funeral.
  • When we were working on creating the reports for our Natural Language, we had no idea how we wanted the API to create a report

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • We are very proud that we could create a project that can be used by people even today to solve issues related to gender equity and inclusion.
  • We are proud that we could figure out how to use Google Cloud APIs and products.
  • We are proud that we were able to figure out how to store user data.
  • We are proud that we were able to use Natural Language Processing to solve a real world problem

What we learned (see more detail)

  • We learned how to use Google Cloud products and APIs.
  • We learned the SQL language.
  • We learned how to create a custom domain name and integrate it in to our webapp.

What's next for PurpleNoodles

  • We plan on scaling up our operations and getting in touch with organizations to see if they can use our web app in their business to help promote gender equity and inclusion.
  • We also would like to report more useful analytics so then the one reviewing the report can get a better idea of what is going on within their organization.
  • We would like to create an API that allows other developers to integrate our service easily into their product.
  • Another important feature that we would like to implement is the ability to automatically take actions within the business's organization to solve the problems going on, such as sending a warning email to the offender to immediately stop their actions.

Originality

Has this project been done before at hackathons in the past? How creative is their project in solving the problem at hand?

  • This never before harassment detection tool can help detect sexual microaggression or discrimination in the language used by an employee.
  • When users enter data, only the organisation can see the report generated by the system and displays statistics based on the data input. This not only respects employee privacy, but helps, for example, the HR department of a business identify sexual harassment in the workplace.

Adherence to Theme

Does the hack adhere to the event's theme? Does it implement that theme fully or just partially?

  • We stuck with the theme of gender equity and inclusion by creating a platform to help solve problems relating to sexual harassment in the workforce and promote gender equity and inclusion.

Completion

Does the hack work? Did the team achieve everything they wanted?

  • Our hack mostly works. We would have like to be able to put everything on the web so then other people can use our product. Also we would have liked to be able to upload different types of files.

Learning

Did the team stretch themselves? Did they try to learn something new? What kind of projects have they worked on before? If a team which always does virtual reality projects decides to switch up and try doing a mobile app instead, that exploration should be rewarded.

  • We stretched ourselves to learn how to use Google Cloud's products and APIs because this is something we have never done before in previous projects.
    • We learned how to use Google Cloud Natural Language API.
    • We learned how to use Google Cloud Speech-to-Text API.
    • We learned how to use Google Cloud Vision API.
    • We learned how to use Google Cloud Storage.
    • We learned how to deploy a web app using Google Cloud.
  • We also tried to implement accounts that store information through a database, which we haven't done in previous hackathons or projects.
    • We learned how to use CockroachCloud Database storage.
  • We also tried to learn more about SQL to create and manage the database and tables.
  • We learned how to integrate a custom domain using GoDaddy Registry with our web app.

Design

Did the team put thought into the user experience? How well designed is the interface? For a website, this might be about how beautiful the CSS or graphics are. For a hardware project, it might be more about how good the human-computer interaction is (e.g. is it easy to use or does it use a cool interface?).

  • We used bootstrap along with HTML and CSS to make the website look beautiful and organised. Because of bootstrap, the user can view the website in any window size without a problem.
  • The interface contains many features that enhance the user experience, such as ...

Technology

How technically impressive was the hack? Was the technical problem the team tackled difficult? Did it use a particularly clever technique or did it use many different components? Did the technology involved make you go "Wow"?

  • We believe that it would be very difficult to recreate this project because it uses Google's natural languange API and cockroach database to store information.

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