Cmd-f is western Canada’s first all-female Hackathon. It took place over 24 hours from March 9th to March 10th and had 200 registered participants. As an official Major League Hacking event, Cmd-f’s first place winners earned points for their school in the international university Hackathon standings.
Emma Gray: “Carol, Julia and I were all surprised and humbled to have won the overall event, as well as the award for best use of the Dragonboard 410c.
L to R Julia Rosenrauch, Emma Gray and Carol Ng
The idea for our hack was inspired by a viral recording of a woman who called 911 to order a pizza, YouTube video here, and our own personal struggles and fears about walking home late at night. We decided to build an app that would provide users with a friendly chatbot for their evening commutes home, while also allowing them to quickly and discreetly alert law enforcement should they start to feel unsafe.
The app uses Amazon Lex to masquerade as a phone or text conversation with a pizza delivery service. It can ask you for details about your order, prompt you for your address, and given certain cue words, change the conversation from casual to alert mode. In alert mode, you’re given the opportunity to share as much information as possible with the bot while your location and situation are shared live to a web app that would ideally be monitored by law enforcement.
Lastly, we set up open-source computer vision software on the Qualcomm Dragonboard 410c in order to detect signs of activity and estimate the safety of the surrounding area.
The weekend was an incredible opportunity to exercise our engineering skills in a different capacity than co-op, design teams, and schoolwork. Since all of the technologies we were using were relatively new to us, it was exciting to see how we could draw on our multidisciplinary backgrounds to tackle unfamiliar technical challenges.
It was also a unique chance to work in an all-female design team and have technical mentors who were also female with backgrounds similar to ours. It was exciting to meet and work with role models we could really identify with.
A lot of the competition came down to a 2-minute speed pitch and demo at the very end, after 24 straight hours of frantic coding and debugging. The skills we developed in ENPH 259 creating the investor pitch gave us a massive leg up on that! It was a fantastic experience all around.
Next step: Piggyback the boards onto existing surveillance camera systems across UBC to provide real-time safety data on and around campus.”
Brilliant inspiration, flawless execution, phenomenal achievement! Congratulations Emma, Carol and Julia!
For more information about this project, visit the web site.