## Inspiration

We visit many places, we know very less about the historic events or the historic places around us. Today In History notifies you of historic places near you so that you do not miss them.

## What it does

Today In History notifies you about important events that took place exactly on the same date as today but a number of years ago in history. It also notifies the historical places that are around you along with the distance and directions. Today In History is also available as an Amazon Alexa skill. You can always ask Alexa, "Hey Alexa, ask Today In History what's historic around me? What Happened Today? What happened today in India.......

## How we built it

We have two data sources: one is Wikipedia -- we are pulling all the events from the wiki for the date and filter them based on users location. We use the data from Philadelphia to fetch the historic places nearest to the user's location and used Mapquest libraries to give directions in real time.

## Challenges we ran into

Alexa does not know a person's location except the address it is registered with, but we built a novel backend that acts as a bridge between the web app and Alexa to keep them synchronized with the user's location.
## Inspiration

Many hackers cast their vision forward, looking for futuristic solutions for problems in the present. Instead, we cast our eyes backwards in time, looking to find our change in restoration and recreation. We were drawn to the ancient Athenian Agora -- a marketplace; not one where merchants sold goods, but one where thinkers and orators debated, discussed, and deliberated (with one another?) pressing social-political ideas and concerns. The foundation of community engagement in its era, the premise of the Agora survived in one form or another over the years in the various public spaces that have been focal points for communities to come together -- from churches to community centers.

In recent years, however, local community engagement has dwindled with the rise in power of modern technology and the Internet. When you're talking to a friend on the other side of the world, you're not talking a friend on the other side of the street. When you're organising with activists across countries, you're not organising with activists in your neighbourhood. The Internet has been a powerful force internationally, but Agora aims to restore some of the important ideas and institutions that it has left behind -- to make it just as powerful a force locally.

## What it does

Agora uses users' mobile phone's GPS location to determine the neighbourhood or city district they're currently in. With that information, they may enter a chat group specific to that small area. Having logged-on via Facebook, they're identified by their first name and thumbnail. Users can then chat and communicate with one another -- making it easy to plan neighbourhood events and stay involved in your local community.

## How we built it

Agora coordinates a variety of public tools and services (for something...). The application was developed using Android Studio (Java, XML). We began with the Facebook login API, which we used to distinguish and provide some basic information about our users. That led directly into the Google Maps Android API, which was a crucial component of our application. We drew polygons onto the map corresponding to various local neighbourhoods near the user. For the detailed and precise neighbourhood boundary data, we relied on StatsCan's census tracts, exporting the data as a .gml and then parsing it via python. With this completed, we had almost 200 polygons -- easily covering Hamilton and the surrounding areas - and a total of over 50,000 individual vertices. Upon pressing the map within the borders of any neighbourhood, the user will join that area's respective chat group.

## Challenges we ran into

The chat server was our greatest challenge; in particular, large amounts of structural work would need to be implemented on both the client and the server in order to set it up. Unfortunately, the other challenges we faced while developing the Android application diverted attention and delayed process on it. The design of the chat component of the application was also closely tied with our other components as well; such as receiving the channel ID from the map's polygons, and retrieving Facebook-login results to display user identification.

A further challenge, and one generally unexpected, came in synchronizing our work as we each tackled various aspects of a complex project. With little prior experience in Git or Android development, we found ourselves quickly in a sink-or-swim environment; learning about both best practices and dangerous pitfalls. It was demanding, and often-frustrating early on, but paid off immensely as the hack came together and the night went on.

## Accomplishments that we're proud of

1) Building a functioning Android app that incorporated a number of challenging elements.

2) Being able to make something that is really unique and really important. This is an issue that isn't going away and that is at the heart of a lot of social deterioration. Fixing it is key to effective positive social change -- and hopefully this is one step in that direction.

## What we learned

1) Get Git to Get Good. It's incredible how much of a weight of our shoulders it was to not have to worry about file versions or maintenance, given the sprawling size of an Android app. Git handled it all, and I don't think any of us will be working on a project without it again.

## What's next for Agora

First and foremost, the chat service will be fully expanded and polished. The next most obvious next step is towards expansion, which could be easily done via incorporating further census data. StatsCan has data for all of Canada that could be easily extracted, and we could rely on similar data sets from the U.S. Census Bureau to move international. Beyond simply expanding our scope, however, we would also like to add various other methods of engaging with the local community. One example would be temporary chat groups that form around given events -- from arts festivals to protests -- which would be similarly narrow in scope but not constrained to pre-existing neighbourhood definitions.
## Inspiration

A walk across campus looking at all the historical buildings and statues of the University of Pennsylvania.

## What it does

The project will be in the form of a web/mobile app. One or several locations are provided to the user. Along with each location an image is provided. The user aims to find the actual location and take a photo that best possibly replicates the image provided. The user has now "unlocked" said location.
The images that are intended to be used are historical images of landmarks, which are displayed to the user with a relatively low opacity and some interesting facts about the landmark. Making it both a thrilling geocaching-like and an educational experience (re-live history!).

## How we built it

Computer vision, API-handling, and web development will be critical elements of this project.
The biggest part of the application was to find a way to accurately decide if two pictures contain the same landmark, thus we spent a fairly big chunk of our development period just trying to make a model that worked as intended.
We built the web app by making a Flask backend, where we provided the utility to upload a picture to compare with, as well as implemented our Siamese Neural Network.

## Challenges we ran into

As the hackathon format doesn't allow for thoughtful and methodical development of AI, we decided to use a pre-existing Computer Vision model to be able to recognize a place, instead of having to train a model for ourselves. A problem we ran into was that most Open Source Computer Vision models are intended for object detection and classification, rather than comparison between two pictures of the same object. Unable to find a suitable model, we were forced to train our own, settling on a Siamese neural network.

## Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're especially proud of providing a proof of concept, with a self-trained Siamese neural network that works as intended. (with the pictures about the same angle)

## What we learned

We learned that getting everything to run smoothly and deploying a functioning model is more of a challenge than expected. Our plane also arrived very late, so we definitely learned that it's beneficial to get stated as soon as possible.

## What's next for Photo cache

A natural next move would be to make the concept into a functioning app for IOS/Android, and fully implement the more educational part of the application.

A website link should be provided in the GitHub repo.