Inspiration
On college campuses, safety is paramount, yet the information we receive is often reactive and fragmented. Emergency alerts, emails, and news reports tell us about dangers after they've happened. We were inspired by the need for a proactive solution—a way for students, faculty, and parents to understand the safety landscape of their campus before stepping out the door. We wanted to move beyond simply reporting crime to actively forecasting it, empowering our community with the foresight to stay safe.
What it does
CampusZone is an AI-powered web application that transforms raw crime data into a dynamic, predictive campus safety map. Our platform provides users with an intuitive, real-time understanding of their environment.
Key Features:
Interactive Danger Zone Map: Visualizes campus areas with color-coded "danger zones" based on recent incident data and predictive risk scores.
AI-Powered Summaries: Utilizes the Google Gemini API to generate natural language summaries of the day's safety forecast, explaining why certain areas are higher risk in plain English.
Side-by-Side Day Comparison: Users can compare the safety maps of two different days to understand how risk levels change under different conditions (e.g., weekday vs. weekend).
Email Alert Subscriptions: A (work-in-progress) feature allowing users to subscribe to weekly safety reports for a chosen location, starting with Orlando.
How we built it
We built CampusZone as a full-stack application, leveraging a modern and powerful tech stack to deliver a seamless user experience.
Frontend:
Framework: Flask with Python
Language: HTML
Styling: CSS
Mapping: Leaflet.js for the interactive map component.
Backend:
Framework: Python with Flask,
Database: PostgresSQL
AI & Machine Learning: Google Gemini API for natural language summaries and risk analysis.
Data Source: SpotCrime API to fetch real-world incident data.
Development & Tooling:
Git & GitHub for version control and remote collaboration.
VS Code as our primary code editor.
Docker Desktop to run the database locally
Challenges we ran into
Our biggest challenge was developing the frontend. Integrating Vite, React, TypeScript, and Tailwind CSS from scratch proved to be a complex undertaking. We battled through a myriad of configuration errors, from "Cannot find module issues with PostCSS and Autoprefixer" to obscure TypeScript errors related to module resolution and component props. Along with npx tailwind -p errors, we decided to eventually switch to just CSS and HTML as using Vite and Tailwind can be weird and it produced a lot of errors.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are incredibly proud of creating a polished, end-to-end, full-stack application in such a short amount of time. Overcoming the persistent and frustrating configuration issues was a major victory in itself. Successfully integrating the Google Gemini API to provide intelligent, contextual summaries helped us grow our technical skills and comfort in the hackathon environment.
What we learned
This hackathon was a deep dive into the realities of modern web development. We learned the importance of version control and how you need to create rules to make sure no one accidentally commits to the main branch. Also, we saw how difficult it was to implement the features we initially visioned and hope to prepare more for our next hackathon. Other than that, it was a valuable learning experience and meeting different kinds of people helped us feel less nervous when in our working state.
What's next for CampusZone
The journey for CampusZone is just beginning. Our roadmap includes:
Enhanced Predictive Model: Expanding our data sources and refining our risk-scoring algorithm for greater accuracy with more fine tuning of the prompt.
User Accounts & Personalization: Allowing users to create accounts, save their primary campus, and set custom alert preferences.
Mobile Application: Developing native iOS and Android applications to put CampusZone directly into the hands of students on the go.
Scalability: Scale our website/app to campuses all across the world, making it a necessity for student endangerment awareness.
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