PolySeeds-for-Peace

Inspiration

As involved students, it is always distressing and heartbreaking for us to see news of civil unrest, conflicts and wars brewing within countries and across borders. The more we saw the lives of people being completely destroyed through wars and conflicts, the stronger we felt that we had a responsibility towards preventing greater loss of life. Hence, the idea for PolySeeds for Peace was born.

What it does

A machine learning model we made takes in a large amount of factors that were determined to contribute to instability in countries, such as economic disparity, corruption, repression, unemployment, past history, etc. and returns a war index for each country. This war index is then depicted on a heat map of the world on our website. Any user can then see what countries are at a higher risk of facing war in the near future.

How we built it

We factored in quantifiable criteria that could raise the chances of war/conflict in a country, and collected data sets. Based on those data sets, we developed a polynomial regression model that returns an index of how likely a country is going to be affected by war based on all of these variables and displays it on a heat map.

Challenges we ran into

The main challenge was to collect all of the variables and data, and create a polynomial regression model that could be used to train the machine, and consolidate all the possibilities into one index. We also weren't able to integrate the backend with the front end in the given amount of time but we would definitely work on that.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of having been able to isolate certain factors that we felt influence the stability of a nation, and extract a quantifiable measurement of each factor for a large amount of countries. We are extremely satisfied to have created a model to train our machine to predict what countries could be impacted the most in the future.

What we learned

We learned how to use polynomial regression and represent data in the form of a heatmap using the Google Cloud Platform.

What's next for PolySeeds for Peace

While PolySeeds for Peace is still a rudimentary way to predict where things are likely to go wrong, it is more importantly, a call to action. A call to action for people, citizens, governments, organizations, to collaborate, talk, and resolve problems which may lead to conflict further down the line. PolySeeds for Peace would like to expand by adding a search feature to view relevant policies and agreements signed by a particular country and how it affected the country to bring it where it stands today.