EcoPress

We strive to make the world a greener place.

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Inspiration

My group and I were inspired by a discussion we had before starting the project. When we found out our technology had to solve a problem related to sustainability, neither of us had much clue which path to follow since we didn't have much knowledge of this area. This is what made us realize just how much people nowadays lack knowledge and awareness of several relevant environmental issues society faces, despite us living in the an era of technology. Therefore, we realized that creating a website centered around creating and developing a community of people that are eager to learn more about sustainability would be a good idea. We also came to the conclusion that much of us had little knowledge on the topic of sustainability because we didn't reserve a specific time of our days to learn more about it. Therefore, our website was also inspired in making sure that sustainability related news is accessible to people that are interested in this subject and that these people can read only about what interests them.

What it does

What our website does it that it is a platform where users can immerse themselves into a community centered around sustainability. We built a web-scraping algorithm that retrieves a large amount of data from the most reliable and well-known newspapers in the world. Then, we integrated a Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence model that can make decisions upon the large amount of content inside the database, by choosing the articles that are related to sustainability according to our selection algorithm. Also, these models were used to suggest solutions to the sustainability problems listed in the articles so that user can interact and reflection upon these social challenges that the world is currently facing. Then, we store these selected algorithms into a filtered database, where its data will be pulled by the search bar on the website where the user can give information about its preferences and filter the articles from this new database even more. As a result, the user receives a list of articles that they can enjoy reading, that increase their awareness and participation as global citizens.

How we built it

We built this website by separating ourselves into the backend and frontend teams. The frontend was responsible for creating the main page, the search pages, as well as styling everything using primarily NextJs. Using this framework made our application simpler to implement and handle, in terms of routing, that enabled us to create a dynamic webpage that can interact with the user. In terms of the backend, we used the Selenium and BeautifulSoup libraries to web-scrape data and put it into the PostgreSQL database. In terms of our model we used the ChatGPT API to filter the websites from our database. Finally, we stored these results in another PostgreSQL database, which then were filtered by the user when he or she typed key words into the search bar.

Challenges we ran into

Our main challenge was communication. First of all, our team of four had one person in Pennsylvania, another in NorCal, another also out of state, and only one in person. This made it harder for us since the team had to coordinate timezones, work-sessions, and meetings all through online communication platforms that was an obstacle to collaboration. Also, this made it harder to debug each other's code, meaning that we were extremely reliant on Git, which occasionally made us run into some problems when merging and collaborating. Additionally, most of our members had never had a considerable amount of contact with the frameworks we used. This meant that there was a lot of learning on the spot, StackOverFlow, and Youtube, to help us be on the same page and develop good code.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I am proud of the fact that everyone actively contributed and fully invested themselves into our work. Despite creating our group through the discord server and not being able to fully get to know each other before starting, I believe that everyone's drive was able to decrease the relevance of this barrier. I am also proud of just how much everyone learned and grew as the hackathon went on. While some had very little coding experience, we were able to level the playing field and everyone was able to learn from each other. Speaking on behalf of the team, I can be sure that we are all proud of each other since every single one of us evolved. Although the frameworks we chose were challenging, we took on the challenge, and with hard work, were able to deliver our project and be happy with our results.

What we learned

What we learned from this experience was to never be scared of challenges. As we were approaching of the competition, we started having a lot of bugs with the API and the modeling which initially discouraged us from for sometime. Then, we had a general meeting and decided to go on with the challenge despite falling behind schedule, instead of choosing an easier idea. Therefore, I believe we all learned to be more perseverant and resilient when stumbling upon problems or bugs that initially look unsolvable. Apart from the many frameworks we learned, I believe that we also learned to trust each other. While it can be scary to have others responsible for certain components of the project, it is a humbling process. It increases your willingness to help and I makes one more passionate about the project as it encourages teamwork that is what drives successful projects.

What's next for EcoPress

In terms of the future of EcoPress, since everyone really enjoyed working in this project and also as a team together, I can see ourselves working on it again in the summer to improve and hopefully push it to publication level one day. By working restlessly for three days in this hackathon, you really put all your energy into the project, so I don't think it is something worth abandoning. There is definitely more room to improve and so we all believe that the sky is the limit for EcoPress. We can expand this project into an actual startup, and with the feedback from HackTech, we believe we will be even more prepared for this challenge.

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