YouAreNotAlone

Inspiration

The inspiration for YouAreNotAlone comes from the pandemic that we are all living in. Ever since Covid-19 began to spread in the United States, people have been in isolation and quarantine. As a result of the isolation and little contact with the outside world, depression has tripled in US adults. This program reminds people that they are not alone in their fight against depression and that others are here to help.

What it does

This program allows the user to choose how they feel, and the backend server then use this keyword to search Twitter tweets of people giving advice or sharing their experiences with the same feeling.

By filtering and curating the search results, we desire to showing the positive and helpful tweets to let users know "you are not alone", and hear what other people do to fight those negative feelings.

How we built it

I built this program using a two layered design: UI App, and Backend API Service. The backend service then interacts with the Social Media System API (Twitter, etc.) to get content.

Here is a simple flow:

1. The UI takes an input from users to indicate how they feel, like depressed, sad, etc.
2. The UI passes the feeling word to my API server.
3. The API server converts the feeling word into Twitter query string and then calls Twitter API.
4. The API server filters and ranks the search results, and pass back to UI.
5. UI display the filtered tweets.

Challenges we ran into

1. With free tier, I only have access to Twitter's recent search API, which can only search back to 7 days.
2. I need to build some knowledge database to further improve our search ranking and filtering.
3. I had trouble on bringing the React twitter embed widget onto UI first. Finally I fixed it by switching to a different library.

What we learned

It was a great experience to do my first Hackthon with my peers. I have been learning programming in the past year as part of the AP Computer Science A class, but doing this kind of project is fun and challenging.

The organizers did a fantastic job. I cannot believe they are high school students!

Thanks to all the organizers and sponsors involved to make this happen!

What's next for YouAreNotAlone

There are three aspects I want to expand in the future:

1. More user interactions. Right now, the user picks a feeling keyword. I am thinking about introducing some chat bot to understand the user feeling better.
2. Expand to other social media, such as YouTube.
3. Improve the search result filtering and ranking.

Built With

• java
• javascript
• react