EcoVillage is a lifestyle tracking app for carbon emissions that tracks all aspects of your day. EcoVillages enables individuals to manage their impact on the environment in a fun, intuitive, and impactful way.

## Inspiration

We used the name Ecovillage, a model of living that looks at sustainability in four dimensions: social, economic, environmental and cultural.

Our app applies these principles to life in urban communities using gamification to incentivize positive change and environmental education. We want to make offsetting your carbon footprint seamless and unobstructive, while giving you a visual representation of your ecological impact. Too often people are bombarded with environmental facts and figures that simply cannot be processed by the human brain. EcoVillage turns that strategy on its head by showing you a virtual village, and the impact your carbon emissions have on it.

## What it does

Not only does our application create awareness, but it makes offsetting carbon emissions, through different channels (like donating resources to plant trees, etc. - Payments supported securely using Square), seamless. It also encourages a positive community by competing with your friends to see who has the lowest carbon footprint.

## How we built it

We built a two-part product that is composed of an application built on Flutter (a cross-platform framework to create mobile, web, and desktop applications with a single source code) to track an individual's carbon emission created by our daily commute and travels. We use the Google Maps API along with a Flutter GeoLocation library to track coordinate displacement and calculate the distance in meters, which is then mapped to an estimate of carbon emission produced per kilometer, on average, by vehicles per year. The second component is a chrome extension that scrapes your online cart while shopping online to estimate a carbon emission based on how the products in your cart are produced and the packaging they come in. This chrome extension is interactive and clear to see and it integrates with our application to make an aggregated carbon emission count.

## Challenges we ran into

Building the application in a language we had never used before (Dart) proved to have its own challenges. From object reference to promise handling, we ran into a lot of programmatic issues while also facing the challenge of understanding a new language. In addition, for our Chrome Extension, having a dynamic DOM from websites proved that the web-scraping had to be robust enough to handle these dynamic changes.

## Accomplishments that we're proud of

We all programmed and worked with technologies that we had never been exposed to before: Flutter/Dart (referencing objects and promise handling), Chrome Extensions, GCP, and even our own designer created wireframes for an application for the first time! Having this whole UI/UX translation process into code was a challenge in itself, so beyond the technical skills, our collaboration and teamwork was something we are extremely proud of.

## What we learned

We learned how having a clear long term goal is good, but unattainable without clear, measurable, and independently do-able tasks. We also learned how important and valuable it is as a team-player to be flexible in the tasks that you have to work in, and having that ability to adapt and jump from task to task, across different technologies, based on the team needs, is essential.

## What's next for EcoVillage

What's next for us? A greener world! We want to encourage people to be aware of their carbon footprint, but awareness, today, is not enough. We allow people to take action, and having this product in the market will help people do that, without getting out of their way or in an inconvenient way. We allow them to make a difference in a seamless, simple, and interactive way.
## Inspiration

We were sitting together as a team after dinner when our team member pulled out her phone and mentioned she needed to log her food – mentioning how she found the app she used (MyFitnessPal) to be quite tedious. This was a sentiment shared by many users we've encountered and we decided there must be a way that we could make this process simple and smooth!

## What it does

Artemis is an Amazon Alexa experience that changes the way you engage in fitness and meal tracking. Log your food, caloric intake, and know what the breakdown of your daily diet is with a simple command. All you have to do is tell Artemis that you ate something, and she'll automatically record it for you, retrieve all pertinent nutrition information, and see how it stacks up with your daily goals. Check how you're doing at anytime by asking Artemis, "How am I doing?" or looking up your stats presented in a clear and digestible way at [www.artemisalexa.com](http://www.artemisalexa.com)

## How we built it

We took the foods processed from the language request, made a call to the Nutritionix API to get the caloric breakdown, and update the backend server which live-updates the dashboard. The smart-sensor waterbottle tracks water level by using ultrasonar waves that bounce back with distance data.

## Challenges we ran into

It's definitely difficult for us to model data beyond the two days we've been working on this project and we wanted to model a lot richer of a data set in our dashboard.

## Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're really proud of the product we've built!

* Polished and pleasant user experience
* Thorough coverage of conversation, can sustain a pertinent conversation with Artemis about healthy eating.
* Wide breadth of data visualization
* Categorical breakdown
* Variances for Caloric intake over the course of the day
* Items consumed as percentages of daily nutritional breakdown
* Light sensor for fluid color detection (aside from water – no cheating with soda!)
* Ultrasonar sensor that measures water level

## What's next for Artemis

* We're hoping to build Fitbit integration so that Alexa can directly log your food into one app.
## Inspiration

Our inspiration for Sustain-ify came from observing the current state of our world. Despite incredible advancements in technology, science, and industry, we've created a world that's becoming increasingly unsustainable. This has a domino effect, not just on the environment, but on our own health and well-being as well. With rising environmental issues and declining mental and physical health, we asked ourselves: *How can we be part of the solution?*

We believe that the key to solving these problems lies within us—humans. If we have the power to push the world to its current state, we also have the potential to change it for the better. This belief, coupled with the idea that *small, meaningful steps taken together can lead to a big impact*, became the core principle of Sustain-ify.

## What it does

Sustain-ify is an app designed to empower people to make sustainable choices for the Earth and for themselves. It provides users with the tools to make sustainable choices in everyday life. The app focuses on dual sustainability—a future where both the Earth and its people thrive.

Key features include:

1. **Eco Shopping Assistant**: Guides users through eco-friendly shopping.
2. **DIY Assistant**: Offers DIY sustainability projects.
3. **Health Reports**: Helps users maintain a healthy lifestyle.

## How we built it

Sustain-ify was built with a range of technologies and frameworks to deliver a smooth, scalable, and user-friendly experience.

Technical Architecture:

Frontend Technologies:

* Frameworks: Flutter (Dart), Streamlit (Python) were used for the graphical user interface (GUI/front-end).
* Services in Future: Integration with third-party services such as Twilio, Lamini, and Firebase for added functionalities like messaging and real-time updates.

Backend & Web Services:

* Node.js & Express.js: For the backend API services.
* FastAPI: RESTful API pipeline used for HTTP requests and responses.
* Appwrite: Backend server for authentication and user management.
* MongoDB Atlas: For storing pre-processed data chunks into a vector index.

Data Processing & AI Models:

* ScrapeGraph.AI: LLM-powered web scraping framework used to extract structured data from online resources.
* Langchain & LlamaIndex: Used to preprocess scraped data and split it into chunks for efficient vector storage.
* BGE-Large Embedding Model: From Hugging Face, used for embedding textual content.
* Neo4j: For building a knowledge graph to improve data retrieval and structuring.
* Gemini gpt-40 & Groq: Large language models used for inference, running on LPUs (Language Processing Units) for a sustainable inference mechanism.

Additional Services:

* Serper: Provides real-time data crawling and extraction from the internet, powered by LLMs that generate queries based on the user's input.
* Firebase: Used for storing and analyzing user-uploaded medical reports to generate personalized recommendations.

Authentication & Security:

* JWT (JSON Web Tokens): For secure data transactions and user authentication.

## Challenges we ran into

Throughout the development process, we faced several challenges:

1. Ensuring data privacy and security during real-time data processing.
2. Handling large amounts of scraped data from various online sources and organizing it for efficient querying and analysis.
3. Scaling the inference mechanisms using LPUs to provide sustainable solutions without compromising performance.

## Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of creating an app that:

1. Addresses both environmental sustainability and personal well-being.
2. Empowers people to make sustainable choices in their everyday lives.
3. Provides practical tools like the Eco Shopping Assistant, DIY Assistant, and Health Reports.
4. Has the potential to create a big impact through small, collective actions.

## What we learned

Through this project, we learned that:

1. Sustainability isn't just about making eco-friendly choices; it's about making *sustainable lifestyle* choices too, focusing on personal health and well-being.
2. Small, meaningful steps taken together can lead to a big impact.
3. People have the power to change the world for the better, just as they have the power to impact it negatively.

## What's next for Sustain-ify

Moving forward, we aim to:

1. Continue developing and refining our features to better serve our users.
2. Expand our user base to increase our collective impact.
3. Potentially add more features that address other aspects of sustainability.
4. Work towards our vision of creating a sustainable future where both humans and the planet can flourish.

Together, we believe we can create a sustainable future where both humans and the planet can thrive. That's the ongoing mission of Sustain-ify, and we're excited to continue bringing this vision to life!