## Inspiration

CredLo was inspired by a personal story of a teammate that talks about the various challenges that immigrants face when moving to a new country. The primary challenge among immigrants is restarting their life in a new place, which begins with their inability to obtain credit as credit scores are non transferable across countries. On top of this, we saw many individuals lack access to a lump sum of money quickly at low interest rates, sparking the need for an automated micro loan system that is diversified, low-risk and easy to use.

## What it does

CredLo uses user-inputted data and personal submissions to generate a credit score for the country that the individual is moving to. Additionally, borrowers are able to attain loans quickly at low-interest rates and lenders are able to lend small amounts of money to a large number of people people at a level of risk that they choose.

## How we built it

We built the backend using Flask/Python to process requests from the lender/borrower as well as for the borrower's onboarding process. We used Capital One's API to make actual transactions between the lender and the lendee. We trained our ML model using sklearn on a dataset we found online. Most of the frontend was built using vanilla HTML/CSS/JS (no wonder it took us ages to build the UI), with a little bit of Vue sprinkled in. The data was stored as a JSON object (with periodic serialization, which to answer your unasked question, yes we eventually intend to use Cloud Firestore for this instead :)

## Challenges we ran into

1. Naming the product and coming up with the tagline was difficult
2. Since none of our teammates are front-end developers, a large chunk of time was spent by trying to make our UI look somewhat bearable to vue (expect a few more puns as you read along). Time spent working on the UI could have been spent working on additional features instead.

## Accomplishments that we're proud of

1. As a team with zero front-end developers, we have a passably pretty UI.
2. We are proud that our product attempts to solve a real need posed by many individuals around the globe. We had other ideas that were more technically sophisticated, but we instead decided to work on a product that had a real-world impact and could positively impact lives in society. After speaking to various individuals in our target market who said that they would have greatly appreciated assistance from the CredLo platform when moving countries, we are proud that we developed a product that can be incorporated into society.

## What we learned

We learned about the various challenges that different groups in society face and the ways in which we can alleviate their stress and headache. We also learned to collaborate and work together as we are a group of students with different backgrounds and skills.

## What's next for CredLo

1. We were restricted by the kind of datasets we had available to use to generate the credit scores. With more time and research, we can improve on the metrics used to come up with an accurate credit score. The eventual goal is to work with banks and other institutions to become a reliable source of information that individuals and institutions can trust.
2. Instead of using user input (which can be faked), we would include verifiable sources of claims such as bank statements, utility bills etc. and extract the necessary data out of them using computer vision.
3. There is currently only an auto-investment mode for lenders. That is, they do not choose who they can lend their money to. We would like to expand the project to allow investors to choose people they think have a sincere need, adjust their rate of interest down if they so wish to, along with the amount of investment (up or down). Eventually, CredLo would provide lenders the possibility to manually invest their money instead of having it automated.
4. Complete integration with Capital One's APIs to facilitate actual bank transfers. We started working on this but left it unfinished due to technical issues.
## Team 4 - Members

Henry Wong, Kieran Hansen, Matthew Kompel, Zuhair Siddiqi

## Inspiration

We wanted to do something related to modern technology. Electronic cars are new and revolutionary and we thought it would be perfect to make a website about them. We realize that a lot of people might be confused on the differences and benefits of different modules, and we wanted to make something that clears that up.

## What it does

Find Your EV takes in a set amount of user specifications and uses our own search algorithm to find the most relevant electronic vehicle that would fit the user. These specifications include price, range, safety, drivetrain, and much more.

## How I built it

We used vanilla Javascript to create our front-end, linked with our searching algorithm in our Python Flask backend. We originally deployed the website using Github Pages, but switched to Heroku to support our backend scripts. We also managed to get and setup a custom domain with Domain.com, [FindYourEV.online](http://findyourev.online/) (sidenote: domain was actually really creative and easy to remember!). Lastly, we built the project on GitHub @ <https://github.com/henryinqz/FindYourEV>

(direct link to website is <http://findyourev.herokuapp.com/client/index.html>)

## Challenges I ran into

Our entire had no prior experience with Web Development. Over the past 36 hours, we were able to gain valuable experience creating our very own full-stack program. A challenge that stumped us was running the backend code on Heroku, and unfortunately, we were unable to deploy the backend so the search function only works locally.

## Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I am proud of my group for being able to manifest our idea into this website in the short time frame provided. While we certainly did not create the most polished program, we had fun making it and that's what matters!😎

## What I learned

I learned a lot about all aspects of web development, such as creating front-end UIs with HTML/CSS/JS, creating backend APIs with Python, linking these two models, and also web hosting.

## What's next for Find Your EV

Find Your EV is an interesting concept that we see as a valuable utility in today's world. With electric vehicles quickly rising in the automotive industry, it can be challenging for buyers to find a suitable EV for them. Thus, there is a market that Find Your EV could reach after being polished up.
## Inspiration

It’s Friday afternoon, and as you return from your final class of the day cutting through the trailing winds of the Bay, you suddenly remember the Saturday trek you had planned with your friends. Equipment-less and desperate you race down to a nearby sports store and fish out $$$, not realising that the kid living two floors above you has the same equipment collecting dust. While this hypothetical may be based on real-life events, we see thousands of students and people alike impulsively spending money on goods that would eventually end up in their storage lockers. This cycle of buy-store-collect dust inspired us to develop Lendit this product aims to stagnate the growing waste economy and generate passive income for the users on the platform.

## What it does

A peer-to-peer lending and borrowing platform that allows users to generate passive income from the goods and garments collecting dust in the garage.

## How we built it

Our Smart Lockers are built with RaspberryPi3 (64bit, 1GB RAM, ARM-64) microcontrollers and are connected to our app through interfacing with Google's Firebase. The locker also uses Facial Recognition powered by OpenCV and object detection with Google's Cloud Vision API.

For our App, we've used Flutter/ Dart and interfaced with Firebase. To ensure *trust* - which is core to borrowing and lending, we've experimented with Ripple's API to create an Escrow system.

## Challenges we ran into

We learned that building a hardware hack can be quite challenging and can leave you with a few bald patches on your head. With no hardware equipment, half our team spent the first few hours running around the hotel and even the streets to arrange stepper motors and Micro-HDMI wires. In fact, we even borrowed another team's 3-D print to build the latch for our locker!

On the Flutter/ Dart side, we were sceptical about how the interfacing with Firebase and Raspberry Pi would work. Our App Developer previously worked with only Web Apps with SQL databases. However, NoSQL works a little differently and doesn't have a robust referential system. Therefore writing Queries for our Read Operations was tricky.

With the core tech of the project relying heavily on the Google Cloud Platform, we had to resolve to unconventional methods to utilize its capabilities with an internet that played Russian roulette.

## Accomplishments that we're proud of

The project has various hardware and software components like raspberry pi, Flutter, XRP Ledger Escrow, and Firebase, which all have their own independent frameworks. Integrating all of them together and making an end-to-end automated system for the users, is the biggest accomplishment we are proud of.

## What's next for LendIt

We believe that LendIt can be more than just a hackathon project. Over the course of the hackathon, we discussed the idea with friends and fellow participants and gained a pretty good Proof of Concept giving us the confidence that we can do a city-wide launch of the project in the near future. In order to see these ambitions come to life, we would have to improve our Object Detection and Facial Recognition models. From cardboard, we would like to see our lockers carved in metal at every corner of this city. As we continue to grow our skills as programmers we believe our product Lendit will grow with it. We would be honoured if we can contribute in any way to reduce the growing waste economy.