Threat Detector

Inspiration

We wanted to create an app that streamlined the process of self-reporting online threats and minimizing their real-world consequences.

What it does

Threat Detector allows the user to submit threatening social media posts. The user would be immediately guided to the most relevant outlets of reporting (local police, school, hotline, etc.) based on their location. Behind the scenes, these posts are then crawled by a web scraper that builds threat profiles that improve over time based on the volume and veracity of past reports, creating a database that may be useful in future threat prevention.

How we built it

Threat Detector was built with Android Studio to create and emulate the phone app portion. A web crawler built with Python and Scrapy is used to gather and assess relevant information from the url submitted by the user.

Challenges we ran into

Some of the most challenging aspects of this project were integrating each software component so that data could be sent from app to crawler to the database and back.

Accomplishments that we're proud of/What we learned

Working on this project provided us with opportunities to learn software which we had little experience with, so creating a successful prototype in itself was an act of perseverance and a significant success for us.

What's next for Threat Detector

Hopefully, in the near future Threat Detector will have functionality in the location-based services element of the app to provide the user with an immediate avenue of reporting. Additionally, long-term this app could serve as a useful tool for prevention by providing authorities with a method of identifying threatening individuals.

Built With

• java
• python