Inspiration
As we were sitting in the classroom, thinking about a subject that we all love to mess with, we often got to ideas that use lots of statistics and databases. Then we thought of how effective can mining the internet be in certain subjects, and what isn't already done. We came up with many ideas, all from different areas, but when Tomer insisted that we can't invent a smart student card, we took our second best option and started working on a project that can tell you where to live based on your individual needs and qualities. Considering the amount of people that are relocating these days and the growing need for a definite answer to the question “Where should I live”, this app has the potential to be used by a wide variety of people coming from various areas around the globe.
What it does
Our application tells you what is the best country in the world for you and your family, based on your ages, professions and salaries. In order to do so, it uses online databases and knows about every new update in the data. It does more than just checking if your family can live in a country financially. It uses much more information, such as the crime and the life quality in every country.
How I built it
In order to get the information, we used Jsoup to export and research online databases. We process the information into different numeric results and calculate every country's total score using java. We used Kolin and java together to optimize our code. We also developed an android app to serve as our GUI in order to allow the user to conveniently input the information required and receive the final result in a simpler way
Challenges I ran into
First, there were lots of databases, but almost all of them weren't good enough. some were easy to find such as the HDI, but others were almost impossible. some databases were built terribly and were very complex, and it took more time to understand how to get to the information inside programmatically. Another challenge we had was we had to take all the information we got and we had to come up with a formula that takes all the variables of a .country and returns a value which best describes how "good" it is.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
One accomplishment we are very proud of was finding the database for salaries by different jobs and countries. after finding it, which was quite an accomplishment by itself, we had to understand how to get to it and use it, since it was built in a very complex way. Luckily, we succeeded getting the data out of it, and to use it in our calculations
What I learned
First, we learned the importance of friendship, and the pleasure in working so close to the 'cyber cyber cyber' master - Tomer Talgam. We learned how to use data mining, and how to access the information we need from all sorts of databases. We learned about the structure of web pages and how to read their tables and elements, and how to use Jsoup in order to do that. Not all of us knew how to program in Java before the hackathon, and we all do now. We learned how to work as a team and we almost had no problems in that field. And the most important thing we learned, is that we can survive for more than 30 hours with no sleep.
What's next for Where Should I Live
First, we wish to rely on more resources such as the happiness index and the freedom index. We then want to consider the user's ability to enter different countries (by his and his family's passports). For instance, we can't send someone from Israel to an enemy state, and we don't feel like sending anyone to North Korea (no offense Kim). After that we want to use people's preferences, such as religion, in order to provide them with a more suitable country. And most important, we want to make our app work on every smart student card (that, of course, we will create in the next hackathon).
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