shashank135sharma / providr

Attempting to solve the problem of food-insecurity through big data

Inspiration Living in the large cities of New Brunswick and New Haven, we felt the need to solve one of the city's most challenging problems. Food insecurity is a problem that not only affects people without sufficient food, but also people that don't have food appropriate for their cultural and dietary needs. For example, many times food pantries give out food that is not culturally appropriate to the cultural diets of the people they are serving, and since these people don't know how to use these ingredients, it is often wasted. For example, if a Pantry is serving a large hispanich population, but just hands out boxes of pasta, a mjority of the population will not know how to cook with the ingredient given to them , and the food would then go to complete waste. Our systems aims to enable communication between the people receiving and giving the help.

What it does So we decided to tackle this problem by creating an application that facilitates a process between food pantries and food-insecure individuals that provides them with the proper food. Users can request the type of food they prefer and our app creates a database of the types of food requested by the users of that respective pantry over time. The app displays this information in the form of a Smart List to the Pantries, generated by a descision tree regression model. This Smart List attempts to get the exact number of each type of food required by the city, and is corrected by an inventory system we offer to pantries. In addition to providing a service to inventory their goods, this inventory system also checks to see if there were excess of any food items ordered, and uses this data to correct the Smart List. For example, if on any given week, the pantry has ordered 500 extra carrots, the algorithm takes this into account to ensure that every dollar spent by the pantry helps get food into the stomachs of food insecure individuals everywhere.

How we built it We created an iOS app that collects data from user input, manages inventories for food pantries, and displays desired and necessary food items to users.

Challenges we ran into Creating and storing data into a server Creating the proper algorithm that suits the goals of the app

Accomplishments that we're proud of Smooth and simple UI Integrated a smart list feature that changes dynamically

What's next for ProvidR Create a large server that accumulates inputted data over multiple pantries over time and expand our services to communities across the country.