🗺️ MERN Stack + ML hackathon project that has won for audience favorite award at YHack2022
Today, Ukraine is on the front lines of a renewed conflict with Russia. Russia's recent full-scale invasion of Ukraine has created more than 4.3 million refugees and displaced another 6.5 million citizens in the past 6 weeks according to the United Nations. Humanitarian aid organizations make trips into war-torn parts of Ukraine daily, but citizens are often unaware of their locations. Moreover, those fleeing the country into surrounding European countries don't know where they can stay. By connecting refugees with those willing to offer support and providing location data for humanitarian aid, YOUkraine hopes to support those unjustly suffering in Ukraine.
Connects refugees and support/humanitarian aid groups in Ukraine.
You can sign up on the app and declare yourself as either a refugee or supporter and connect with each other directly. Refugees will get tailored recommendations for places to stay, which are offered by supporters, based on family size and the desired country. Refugees will also be able to access a map to view the locations of humanitarian relief organizations such as UN Refugee Agency, Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders, Central Kitchen and many more.
Tech Stack: MERN (Mongodb, Express.js, React.js, Node.js)
We used React (JS), Framer-motion, Axios, Bcrypt, uuid, and react-tinder to create a visually pleasing and accessible way for users to communicate.
For live chat and to store user data, we took advantage of MongoDB, express.js, and node.js because of its ease of access to set up and access data.
For the recommendation feature, we used Pandas, Numpy and Seaborn to preprocess our data. We trained our tf-idf model using Sklearn on 3000 different users.
- 3 person team that started late, doesn't get the early worm :(
- It was the first time anyone on the team has worked with MERN stack (took a lil'figuring out, but it works!)
- Had to come up with our own dataset to train with and needed to remake the dataset and retrain the model multiple times
- NO UI/UX DESIGNER (don't take them for granted, they're GOD SENDS)
- We don't have much experience using cookies and we ran into a lot of challenges, but we stuck it out and made it work (WOOT WOOT!)
- WE GOT IT DONE!! 30 hours of blood, sweat, and tears later, we have our functioning app :D
- We can now proudly say we're full stack developers because we made and implemented everything ourselves, top to bottom :)
- Designing the app from scratch (no figma/ uiux designer💀)
- USER AUTHENTICATION WORKS!! ( つ•̀ω•́)つ
- Using so many tools, languages and frameworks at once, and making them work together :D
- Submitting on time (I hope? 😬)
YOUkraine has a lot to do before it can be deployed as a genuine app.
- Add security features and encryption to ensure the app isn't misused
- Implement air raid warnings and 'danger sightings' so that users can stay informed and avoid conflict zones.
- Partner with NGO's/humanitarian relief organizations so we can update our map live and provide more insights concerning relief efforts.
- Enhance our recommendation feature (add more search terms)
- Possibly add a donation feature to support Ukraine