WASP: Women's Alert and Safety Platform

note: we won third place in magichacks

Inspiration

We created the Women's Alert and Safety Program (WASP) to aid women struggling with sexism and inappropriate sexual advances. We see women facing grave injustices, story after story, headline after headline. Their desperate solicitations are rapidly silenced, leaving them to endure their trauma and fear alone. The anonymity of WASP allows women, specific women in schools, to reach out and receive support from their classmates with similar fears and experiences. WASP also acts as a communication platform where alerts and precautions are posted.

What it does

A post platform with machine learning where women can share advice and information specific to their schools to help out other women and also speak up anonymously.

Features: The home page has both a login and sign up button. The user is forced to sign up with their student ID before making any posts. This allows the user’s information to be added to the database and stores it using cookies in the browser so all the users posts and comments can be traced back to the user using their student ID.

The feed allows users to view other posts. These posts are filtered and only the posts from the same school are shown. Additionally, if the user is a student, they can only see posts for students and everyone. The same applies for teachers and administration. The user can also comment on posts made by others.

All posts are screened using machine learning to make sure that there is no emergency occurring. If an emergency is detected, a text message is sent to the administrator and the visibility is changed to administrators only.

There is also button that the administrator can click to send alerts to all women that signed up for the website with their phone number to notify them of the emergency.

There is a search feature for people to search for keywords.

A map that marks incidents where women have been assaulted/harmed in the past. Users can submit locations where they were harmed in the past so other women can see what areas are unsafe(ex: a woman walking home alone at night would know where to walk home and where to avoid)

How we built it

We used many different platforms and languages for this, which was one of our main issues. We used Pycharm to code in Python, HTML, and Javascript files. This was done using the Flask framework which enabled us to link all three types of files to link all the files that pointed toward a database that we built using SQLite. We created 3 tables to store user data through SQLite. We used the OpenAI API to analyze users' text and make sure that there is no emergency. We incorporated a Twilio API to send text messages to the administrator in case of an emergency and also to send to all women registered on the app.

Challenges we ran into

We faced multiple obstacles during this work period including issues with operating a Google Maps Javascript API through Git and node.js. It was also challenging to implement the APIs and incorporate them into the actual project. One of the hardest parts was getting the user input from the HTML to be analyzed by the ML in python and then be determined if an automatic text message should be sent. We also had issues with saving the Python cookies in the browser to make sure that the user would stay logged in and that all posts and comments are linked to their profile.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re proud of the way all the components of our project came together to complement each other. All of our different components were coded separately and it was really hard for us to put all of them together. The tables worked well together to make sure that the users, posts, and comments are linked together. We are also happy with our successful integration of three different APIs.

What we learned

Using Python for webapps using the framework Flask
Using SQLITE to store data with Python
Using Google Maps API
Sending SMS Messages using Python with Twilio
Using Machine Learning to analyze text
Using cookies in Python to store login information
Creating different tables to store different information and make them connect

What's next for WASP(Women's Alert and Safety Platform)

We hope to create a feature where the user can enter a location and see a graph of incidents over time and how many overall incidents. This can provide more insights for women to be able to walk around school campuses and the surrounding area more safely.