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Making BringTheFood smarter: from posting and collecting food to rewards

Updated 6 hours 53 min ago

At the last edition of RHoK in June 2011, a group of developers from Trento built a prototype of a mobile web application to fight food wastage. The application - called BringTheFood - allows donors (suppliers) to post ‘still eatable food‘ by specifying the detail of the food (a short description of the food, the available and expire period of the food, number of people the food can serve, and the address at which the food can be picked) and collectors first should book an offer (i.e., a food) and collect it before the expiration period. BTF does not deal with food distribution to the actual food seekers. BTF has also a mechanism to encourage food donors to actively participate by providing rewards.

We would like to expand the features of BTF in order to make it smarter and to use it to encourage food donations, in developed countries as well as in areas struck by famine.

Enhanced Reward Model: The computation of the current rewarding system is a simple model based on the number of people served by the food donated by the donor. We are looking for a "smarter" way to rate donors and collectors, to be integrated with the application, and we ask hackers to devise a reward mechanism to improve participation by giving incentives to occasional donors.
Smart Searching and Filtering of Offers. In big cities there might be a reasonably large number of offers. The current implementation of BTF just displays all the available offers in sequential order according to the date of expiration and also displays nearby offers (with respect to the collector) on a map. This can pose a problem for the collector to find the right offer. BTF should allow the collector to search offers according to certain keywords (e.g., the type of food s/he looking for, location, and with in a certain range of distance). Some foods (e.g., meat) have also religious importance (e.g., halal food), thus the new feature should provide a facility to the collector to specific such categories. The searching can be refined by, e.g., food type, location, date of post, (and from which supplier). The platform could also recommend the collector based on his query, and some heuristics (e.g., by applying machine learning techniques).
Logistic support. Currently, BTF has a ‘distributor’ concept. These are volunteers who coordinate with ‘collectors’ to facilitate the actual food distribution. Since the food collectors sometimes look for volunteers not only to distribute the food but also to collect from the offered place, collectors would like to post their needs to look for volunteers for picking and distributing the food in order to optimize routes and reduce costs. At the moment, BTF does not facilitate such logistic support. Therefore, we want to introduce logistics support (as a service) to the current implementation of BTF, to arrange transport of foods, supporting communication between collector and logistic support providers. For example, the collector can broadcast (by SMS) to the subscribed ‘transporters’ through SMS (or another means) for available transport and organize the actual logistic.

Categories: Food Security, Urban

Early Warning Remote Sensing for Water Table Management

Updated 17 hours 23 min ago

Can we deploy a system of remote sensors in local groundwater wells in order to measure and manage water table levels? A system of remote sensors would measure water levels in local wells. When water levels dropped below a critical level at which the salt concentration is below a certain threshold, for example, 150 mg/L, the sensor would share this information with a centralized monitoring server.

This requires simultaneous measurements of water level and salt concentration. Salinization as well as many soil-water interface parameters can be measured indirectly through electrical conductance monitoring devices (electrical conductivity probes).

When XX [percentage--or similar measurement, what?] sensors indicated the water levels had fallen below a certain point, an alert would be issued [to whom], triggering and enabling a water management response.

Categories: Agriculture, Environment, Water

First Nation Access To Water and Sanitation (In Canada)

Updated 17 hours 43 min ago

Force Provincial and Federal governments to take action and address the water quality issues in First Nation Communities...

Provide geo-tagged text tweets to government accounts forcing the issue to light...

"There are 231 drinking water advisories (DWAs) in 105 of 630 First Nations communities, many communities have multiple DWAs and some have been under these advisories for more than 5 years. 80% have been in place for more than one year, an occurrence that would simply not take place in other communities. In addition, he recounted that there were only 65 DWAs in 2006, but there are 124 today – a massive increase. Despite the problems with retaining qualified water operators, only 5% of the DWAs are caused by staffing or training issues, which demonstrates, he says, the diligence of the plant employees." Irving Leblanc is an engineer who works as the Acting Director of the Assembly of First Nations Housing and Infrastructure Directorate as well as its Water Specialist.

Hopefully we can integrate the data from http://www.water.ca/map-graphic.asp

with this list

http://politwitter.ca/canadian-government

so that anytime a person in one of these communities has to boil water for a simple task they send a messsage that is geotagged and tweets at the appropriate government representatives...

Cheers!

Stephen

Categories: Water

Truth detector for political ads

Updated 20 hours 15 min ago

We're developing an app to do audio detection on political ads and return information about the ad and its veracity. Given the popularity of tools to listen to songs and return the title and artist, we think there is an interest in a tool like this. Most smartphone usage is done in the home, and this app will help people access trustworthy information about ads more easily.

The app will use echonest for the audio processing, and the team is working to connect the echonest fingerprint of an ad with information about the ad, and then with journalistic resources and analysis of the ad. The app is being developed for Android.

This idea came up at a brainstorming session at Hacks/Hackers Philadelphia.

Categories: Education, Urban

Hardware Hack for Autism Classroom

Updated 1 day 3 hours ago

Many Students with autism have significant sensory integration issues. (The inability create coherant information from the deluge of visual, audio and tactile data that constantly enters the brain)

Many teachers have found that students can concentrate better in class if they wear noise-canceling headphones with their favorite sounds playing. However, this also prevents the teacher from inerrupting their work with instructions to the class.

The desired solution is a hardware/software hack that would replicate the entertainment system found on many airlines today: each passenger can listen/watch to their prefered program, yet when the flight attendant needs to talk to the passengers, his/her input overrides the programming and all passengers hear the annoucement.

One possible solution is a modified MP3 player, that monitors an FW frequency while playing the MP3. The teacher would have a low-powered FM transmitter that he/she would use to broadcast to all the students. Other solutions would be viable also.

Categories: Education

Upload Tool for Person Finder

Updated 2 days 15 hours ago

What is Person Finder?

Person Finder is a searchable public database of missing persons. It was created by Google volunteers in response to the Haiti earthquake in January 2010. It was used again for the Chile earthquake, the Pakistan floods, the christchurch earthquake and the Japan earthquake. It now runs at http://googlepersonfinder.appspot.com/.
Person Finder is an open source Python application running on App Engine. http://code.google.com/p/googlepersonfinder for details.
Person Finder implements the PFIF data model (see http://zesty.ca/pfif), including import and export in PFIF, as well as PFIF Atom feeds.
The Person Finder Data API allow to search, read and write to Person Finder: http://code.google.com/p/googlepersonfinder/wiki/DataAPI

Suggested Problem to solve: Some organizations may have list of missing people in basic format such as spreadsheet. These organizations may not have the tech resources to write a tool themselves to upload these names to PF. So having a simple tool they can download, maybe change a few parameters in a config file, and then run to upload their data to PF, would be very useful.

Risk for natural disasters - landslides

Updated 2 days 16 hours ago

Because of the risk of our country to sufer natural disasters the idea of work on this challenge is creating an early warning system and control of water effluents.

Rivers buoys will measure the water level. When the buoys detect an increase in the flow, it sends an SMS to a control group that is responsible for activating local warning mechanisms for citizens.

Categories: Disaster Resiliency, Water

Making Water Saving Technology Transparent and Accessible

Updated 2 days 18 hours ago

There are a number of ways households can save on water expenses and store additional water capacity in the event of a natural disaster. However, the incentives are not always enticing enough to persuade people to make investments in rainwater harvesting systems, or more efficient water saving technology in general. This is a problem because water hogs can continue consuming more water despite the fact that they paying for every litre they consume. Adapting to climate change is going to require people to make smart investments in water saving technology so that when disasters do happen, the collective impact will be reduced. An app can be developed that collects information about the existing inventory of water saving technology in a jurisdiction and demonstrate the water saving potential of such technology matched up against conventional systems. By showing people comparative household water efficient technology and the amount that can be saved both in use and in dollars can take us one step further into adapting to climate change and thinking about household water sustainability. This app could be popular through online social media sites such as Facebook, or even a collection of Twitter feeds or blog posts.

Categories: Water

Improving public transportation reliability to encourage people reduce their carbon footprint.

Updated 2 days 22 hours ago

In many countries we face the problems of people staying in remote villages and having a very limited access to transportation like buses and trains.

Added to this is the irregularity in timings and people having to wait hours together braving the weather. In places like India and Indonesia people in remote places barely have a notion of a frequent bus/train service. This problem also persists in developed in and developing nations where we wonder when our next ride would come. Due to this sort of unreliable infrastructure people often take to their own modes of transportation adding to their carbon footprint.

Although one may think that a solution has been found to this problem where all one has to do is to fix a gps tracking device on the bus to be able to track it. But if you look around you'd notice even the developed cities in the world would not have gps attached to all buses/trains ( any transportation entity for that matter). One may attribute this to lack of active governance, poor infrastructure etc.

Our goal here is to use user feedback to be able to keep track of transport entities in a semi-real time way without having to depend on govt infrastructure support and implementation and reducing the cost factor tremendously as we would not have to install gps tracking devices on each of those entities which eventually would be the solution in some of the developed nations.

A good example would be a city like Atlanta which is one of the biggest cities in the US. does not have a really good way to track a bus and often people have faced situations where they had to wait for long hours.

Taking an example of a developing nation, say like India, where the bus services are plenty, but extremely irregular.

Finally if we consider of poor nations, transportation facilities could be scarce and irregular.

Our goal is to provide a solution that caters to these problems and across all types of transportation infrastructure establishment in all countries.

Categories: Environment, Transportation

Webcam Water Flow Monitor

Updated 3 days 3 hours ago

Use webcam images/video to estimate water stage/flows in natural and manmade water channels/rivers. Should provide an inexpensive way to monitor river/canal flows. Currently high cost of flow sensors and telemetry (est. US$ 2000+) make it difficult to deploy in developing country settings and result in inadequate real-time knowledge of water flows. This information is critical for operational management (e.g. dam/canal operations) and for disaster management (e.g. flood early warning systems). Using simple and ubiquitous web cams (e.g. from fixed locations) to get images/video feeds (and sent using simple GSM telemetry or other options as appropriate) can provide information that can be interpreted (e.g. using pattern recognition software) to correlate with actual water flows (using short measurement records for calibration). This can then create a system where future flows can be interpreted directly from the webcam imagery at a fraction of the cost of modern sensors.