How we created PhillyHelpJawn at the Big Philly Meetup MashUp Hackathon

The Big Philly Meetup MashUp Hackathon on Sunday at Indy Hall brought together people from across Philly to work on projects related to a 'Good Neighbors' theme.

I was privileged to work on a team with Em Podhorcer, Georgette Nicolaides, and Karl Ericksen on a project we called PhillyHelpJawn.

Our project envisioned using AI in a practical way to help people challenged by poverty and low literacy navigate the array of available services and its myriad differing schedules and restrictions.

In six hackathon hours we built a native iPhone app with a voice-first and icon-based UX connecting to an intelligent back end which can interpret requests for help and respond with timely and appropriate suggestions regarding currently available resources and directions on how to get to them.

A short video showing how we came together and the application we built can be seen on Youtube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMfoJtXvgyM&pp=0gcJCcMKAYcqIYzv :

We were told today this project won the Most Helpful Use of AI — Signature Category award sponsored by OmbuLabs.ai. As a team we want to thank the judges and Ombulabs.ai for this important validation of our concept and execution.

The open source repo can be found at https://lnkd.in/eBNqXhNP.

Thanks to Alex Hillman at Indy Hall for organizing the hackathon, to all the other teams who participated and inspired us, and most importantly to my team members, who are so very awesome, thoughtful, and impressive as people and as teammates.