ValYou

ValYou's Landing Page (valyou-gt.com)
ValYou Scores are returned in a simple and elegant format
Compare the diversity scores of two websites side-by-side

Inspiration

After hearing about the increasing disparity in technology from Dr. Bobb's speech at the Opening Ceremony, we decided to create a tool, ValYou, that could help provide greater insight into the diversity portrayed by various institutions, whether it be a school or a company. In a more connected world, we hope that this tool will be used by companies to improve their online presence to be more inclusive.

What it does

ValYou crawls through a website's links and grabs image files located in the site. It then uses the Clarifai API to analyze the ethnic, gender, and age makeup of the people shown in a website's pictures. Using these values, it calculates overall scores that show the general diversity of the website.

How we built it

ValYou's front end is built using HTML and CSS to create a fully responsive and mobile friendly design. Its backend is built NodeJS, Cheerio for webscraping, and the Clarifai API for visual analysis.

Challenges we ran into

We initially ran into issues deciding what to build our project with. We ran into many issues attempting to build an Angular App before finally settling on pure JavaScript. We also ran into issues with the API limiting our requests, forcing us to make cuts on our crawl capabilities.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

One thing we're really proud of is our project's responsive and mobile-friendly UI, which we took extra time to create. Though the core functionalities are not entirely finished, we feel that the front-end experience we created is an accurate reflection of what ValYou could become. In addition to this, we are proud of our teamwork through this hackathon. In spite of not all being in the same grade, having the same skillset, or even being from the same school, we came together as a group and devoted all our energy towards an idea we believed in.

What we learned

We learned a lot about connecting a front-end to a back-end, as well as working with Angular, even though we didn't implement it into our project. We also got some first-hand experience with Clarifai, which we all enjoyed working with.

What's next for ValYou

We hope to increase the crawling capabilities of ValYou, as well as image filtering to remove miscellaneous icons, to provide more accurate diversity ratings for websites.