DGTM - ChangeMakers - Emitly

Inspiration

We wanted to create an application that will better allow users to familiar with the impact they have around them. Although ambitious, we wanted to build something that was heavily inspired by the Good Place. Where all actions (to a certain degree) have a positive or negative impact, and that is a score that we keep.

This score isnt neccessairly to jude, but rather keep yourself and those around you informed so that you can make better and educated decesion that will impact those around you!

Good Place

What it does

This application takes carbon emission data from the world and in-depth data from Canada and runs an ML model to see in which direction the emissions are trending. Moreover,we have taken the Duolingo approach of reminding users to log various tasks daily to see the impact that they make. This data being tracked, once updated, also runs and provides a projection on how your habits are trending how what it looks like you're currently doing, and possibly going to impact the carbon emissions in the future. Allowing yourself to make a better judgment call before carbon emissions get too high. With the AI assistant Emmet, he will be your guide on how you could improve over time, and get 1:1 feedback as well!

How we built it

Knowing we wanted to make a product for everyday use, we opted to build this project in React-Native and Expo Go as the front, using Python Fast-Api in the backend for our api to connect various sources. We decided to use Databricks as our data warehouse, as it's an extremly powerful tool with tons of capabilities such as AI, ML, and Data engineering. Considering we were looking to do all the above and allow users to make a data-driven decision, we decided to go for it. Finally, we also used SupaBase as our primary Database provider for authentication and user management.

Challenges we ran into

Challenges we ran into were setting our scope too high, as well as the primary API we wanted to use having been sunset earlier this year. We quickly jumped on the Carbon Interface API, but after spending a little time with it and some digging, we realized it was no longer being managed, so we had to find data that was free and we could still train ML with, and optionally update over time.

Additionally, we sought to make an MVP product which would allow users to track all carbon emissions they would be able to do, but as the hours ticked on, we quickly realized we had a lot to do and little time to do it. With that, our scope was too high. Not only did we want to make an IOS native feeling app, we also wanted to create a hardware project that would be an add-on to the software. We quickly got sucked into the code and the loop of debugging and getting the project to a point where we could be proud and call it. Especially since it was a team of only 2 people. We wanted to create a more robust and smooth Ux/Ui as well as better data insights for users of the application.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are really proud of being able to make a fairly pleasant-looking application that worked well with several different tools and interacted with all of them in different ways. We never really got it all working 100% but it was interesting to see how we could use Expo, with React Native and Databricks in a single use case. Also, being able to provide users with their own ML data.

What we learned

We learned that for the future to be more inline and concrete with the scope. We ended up making some bold decisions early on, and planned other things after the fact, which quickly caught up to us as the evening came up.

What's next for DGTM - ChangeMakers - Emitly

Ideally, being able to revamp the frontend and support the creation of all the components we didnt get a chance to add, as well as be able to provide users with the ML insights that are now going to be calculated for the,