Sonder

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Find locals near you

Inspiration

You are the main character in your story, but every passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as yours

The places that seem foreign and unfamiliar to us are the same places where others grew up and created thousands of unique stories.

Experience your travels in a fresh and authentic way by going off the beaten path, and getting a glimpse into the worlds of locals. With sonder, you can immerse yourself in the culture by connecting with the locals in the area, have a point of contact in the case of unprecedented emergencies, or even befriend someone for memorable conversations.

What it does

Sonder is a machine learning web platform that helps connect visitors with locals during their travels. When you are traveling to a different place, to get the full experience you must go off the beaten path and try to see the world through the eyes of locals. At the same time, it is important to stay safe in an unknown place. In the case of emergencies where you do not know how to contact the authorities and may not be near people, it helps to be able to contact someone who knows the area where you are.

Our motivation behind this project is for tourists and travellers to be able to connect with locals anytime and anywhere in case they need help translating, booking a reservation, or finding their way in a new area. With sonder, you can immerse yourself in the culture by connecting with the locals in the area, have a point of contact in the case of unprecedented emergencies, or even befriend someone just for memorable conversations.

How we built it

To help you connect with locals in the area for recreational activities, we have built a machine learning model based on a natural language processing filter to recommend locals who have similar interests as you. The datasets of locals with their expertise and interest were processed through the machine learning model executing on the IBM-Z mainframe. Our natural language processing model will parse through the keywords to classify the top 5 profiles of the locals that will be able to assist you given your situation. In order to make this more effective in terms of distance, we have utilized the Google Maps API to create an interactive map where you can see locals pinned to find the closest local to you.

What we learned

Natural language processing, a lot about Google Maps API and Flask!

What's next for Sonder

We would like to incorporate more profiles and information about the user. As of right now, we have a sign up page that allows the users, both locals and travellers, to enter their information. For registered locals, we would like to incorporate a background check that will ensure that the locals are trustworthy and do not have any criminal records. As a machine learning platform, we will be able to train our model more accurately given more datasets on keywords as more locals and travellers use this application. Through a deep learning platform, the more keywords that are fit into the model, the better it will perform when giving the tourist the top locals that are able to help them in any emergency situation. Additionally, we would like to include more filters, including age and distance, to provide more relevant search results and constrain the number of locals in the area before passing it through the machine learning model.