## Inspiration

After my visit to Egypt this summer, I realized how I needed internet in an internet deprived place !

## What it does

It's basically an Artificial Intelligence on a hotline that should assist you in finding answers to any of your questions. You can ask it :

* direction
* distance
* time
related questions.

## How I built it

Call the hotline and ask your Questions ! You'll receive a text message shortly with an answer to your question.

## Challenges I ran into

## Accomplishments that I'm proud of

## What I learned

Twilio but more Node JS and PHP

## What's next for Hello

More integration to NLP and other open source technologies to be able to answer more questions.
## Inspiration

We really wanted to use Computer Vision and AI to do something that might be beneficial to others. I wanted this app to be a reminder to be more self-conscious about what you are doing, but we made it so it relays data and lets your friends and family know as well. Imagine crunch time at 10 PM at night for a project due at 11:59 PM. Turn Stay In The Know on to keep you focused on the task at hand.

## What it does

This project uses machine learning and AI to detect humans and the objects they are holding. We are able to determine what the person is doing and relay a specific command with text to speech to notify the action. It will also send a text message to anyone you want to notify them of what you are doing, anytime anywhere. For example, when working on that project mentioned earlier any phone time should be off limits. Our program can detect any usage of phones and warn the users to put it back down!

## How we built it

We used OpenCV for our computer vision and TensorFlow for our machine-learning model. We integrated Google's text-to-speech for it to narrate the actions that are being done, and we used Twilio's API to send text messages to notify others about the user's actions.

## Challenges we ran into

The main challenge we had was getting the text-to-speech to work. The text-to-speech either lagged the frame of the computer vision or kept on repeating itself. It is very hard to solve both issues so we tried to compromise as little as we can to insure the text-to-speech is working and it is not too laggy for the computer vision. There was also a lot of permission errors when storing and reading audio files used for TTS.

## Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were really proud of what we were able to accomplish with very limited knowledge on computer vision and machine learning. It was our first times using all these new APIs and libraries, but we were able to make it work and combine everything together to get one coherent application.

## What we learned

We learned a lot about computer vision and machine learning. It was also our first time using Twilio's API to send text messages and our first time using python to do all these projects. It was a steep learning experience to learn new libraries and read through documentation, but it was a rewarding experience.

## What's next for Stay In The Know

It would be great if we were able to perfect our computer vision application to be seamless and run on the GPU. The actions could be improved for more precise detection and there can be a increase of available messaging formats, such as email and whatsapp. In the future it should even be able to detect anything in the world to cater any events requiring people to Stay In The Know!
## Inspiration

While we were doing preliminary research, we had found overwhelming amounts of evidence of mental health deterioration as a consequence of life-altering lockdown restrictions. Academic research has shown that adolescents depend on friendship to maintain a sense of self-worth and to manage anxiety and depression. Intimate exchanges and self-esteem support significantly increased long-term self worth and decreased depression.

While people do have virtual classes and social media, some still had trouble feeling close with anyone. This is because conventional forums and social media did not provide a safe space for conversation beyond the superficial. User research also revealed that friendships formed by physical proximity don't necessarily make people feel understood and resulted in feelings of loneliness anyway. Proximity friendships formed in virtual classes also felt shallow in the sense that it only lasted for the duration of the online class.

With this in mind, we wanted to create a platform that encouraged users to talk about their true feelings, and maximize the chance that the user would get heartfelt and intimate replies.

## What it does

Reach is an anonymous forum that is focused on providing a safe space for people to talk about their personal struggles. The anonymity encourages people to speak from the heart. Users can talk about their struggles and categorize them, making it easy for others in similar positions to find these posts and build a sense of closeness with the poster. People with similar struggles have a higher chance of truly understanding each other. Since ill-mannered users can exploit anonymity, there is a tone analyzer that will block posts and replies that contain mean-spirited content from being published while still letting posts of a venting nature through. There is also ReCAPTCHA to block bot spamming.

## How we built it

* Wireframing and Prototyping: Figma
* Backend: Java 11 with Spring Boot
* Database: PostgresSQL
* Frontend: Bootstrap
* External Integration: Recaptcha v3 and IBM Watson - Tone Analyzer
* Cloud: Heroku

## Challenges we ran into

We initially found it a bit difficult to come up with ideas for a solution to the problem of helping people communicate. A plan for a VR space for 'physical' chatting was also scrapped due to time constraints, as we didn't have enough time left to do it by the time we came up with the idea. We knew that forums were already common enough on the internet, so it took time to come up with a product strategy that differentiated us. (Also, time zone issues. The UXer is Australian. They took caffeine pills and still fell asleep.)

## Accomplishments that we're proud of

Finishing it on time, for starters. It felt like we had a bit of a scope problem at the start when deciding to make a functional forum with all these extra features, but I think we pulled it off. The UXer also iterated about 30 screens in total. The Figma file is *messy.*

## What we learned

As our first virtual hackathon, this has been a learning experience for remote collaborative work.
UXer: I feel like i've gotten better at speedrunning the UX process even quicker than before. It usually takes a while for me to get started on things. I'm also not quite familiar with code (I only know python), so watching the dev work and finding out what kind of things people can code was exciting to see.

# What's next for Reach

If this was a real project, we'd work on implementing VR features for those who missed certain physical spaces. We'd also try to work out improvements to moderation, and perhaps a voice chat for users who want to call.