PredictiveCrowdDonations

Inspiration

2020 has been an uncertain year, to say the least. Global health crises, wildfires, and numerous natural disasters has left many people in disarray, but has also led to many relief efforts and good causes. One of the best uses of technologies during this time is in creating ways to give individuals ways to contribute to relief efforts, as well as to give people financial tools to help themselves during uncertain times.

Project Explanation

Our web platform is meant to be a community crowdfunding platform where individuals can form groups and donate money to good causes such as relief efforts and vaccine development. The platform would allow for community formation and fund accumulation, and would also provide some investment guidance if the group wishes to invest their funds to generate more money for donation. Guidance is based on a machine learning model that predicts stock prices of certain companies, to give group leaders an idea of investment options.

Development tools

The website was built using React and Bootstrap styling along with Firebase backend services for user authentication and information storage. The machine learning model was built using Python, Tensorflow, and associated machine learning Python libraries.

Complications during development...

Getting the machine learning libraries to work nicely with Python, as well as setting up the React website proved to have a lot more complications than we had anticipated, and we were unable to overcome the import errors and complications to complete the website frontend in time.

Accomplishment

After many import errors and troubleshooting, we were able to complete the LSTM machine learning model! However hosting it as a web service turned out to be error-inducing as well.