Hackathon4Justice 2.0 winner is a solution that prevents child abuse
Predex—a team of University of Lagos and Covenant University students—has emerged winner of Hackathon4Justice 2.0 organised by Andela in partnership with Facebook and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).
Hackathon4Justice 2.0 was held over the weekend (February 8—9) at Andela's Epic Towers.
"It was a pleasure hosting Hackathon4Justice for the second year running at Andela," Omogbolahan Alli, Partner Engineering Manager at Andela said. "The energy that radiated from these young students as they focused on their projects was incredible."
Why are Covenant University grads doing relatively better than grads from other institutions in Nigeria? Vote and RT.
— Dr. Dípò Awójídé (@OgbeniDipo) February 6, 2020
Hackathon4Justice 2.0 convened students from higher institutions across Nigeria to build prototype of solutions that can tackle crime, uphold justice and promote the rule of law.
Up to 50 students from selected Nigerian tertiary institutions participated in the hackathon and they split into teams. Some of the prototypes they built addressed challenges such as child abuse, animal poaching, drug trafficking, and e-waste.
As the winner of the Hackathon4Justice 2.0, Predex received an all-expense paid trip to attend the 14th congress of UNODC that will be held in Kyoto, Japan, from April 20—27, this year.
Predex' deep learning solution could be used to detect child predators prowling on their victims before they strike. It flags suspicious conversations between children and potential predators, thereby helping authorities and parents to prevent abuse.
That's me guys 💃💃.#Education4Justice 2020 winner https://t.co/1728oSx3wE
— Tomisin (@gbots__) February 10, 2020
Speaking with benjamindada.com, Tomisin, who is student of Covenant University, said: "It was really cool working with my other teammates from UNILAG. There was synergy."
We hope to keep working on the project. Machine learning becomes more accurate as it is fed more data so that's something we hope to do actively. And as time goes on, we would refine the project.
The runners-up teams were RecyclAI and InsideLife VR, and they received Oculus Go and Sure Gift coupons, respectively.
The solution of RecyclAI, the first runner-up, is based on object classification. It uses artificial intelligence to detect recyclable electronic waste (e-waste). The team also added features, such as blogs and newsletters, that would sensitize users about solutions to e-waste recycling on their web application.
According to E-Waste Relief Foundation, e-waste is not only harming Nigerians and the ecosystem, the country is also losing billions of naira in revenue due to improper management of e-waste.
Electronic waste include electronic devices set for refurbishment, reuse, resale, recycling, or disposal.
Team InsideLife VR, which came third, built a solution that uses the cardboard virtual reality SDK to provide an immersive educative interactive experience on the rule of law.
Andela is known for being the home of and for celebrating technical excellence; seeing how this group of students tackled the problems they were given, their approach to teamwork, the focus that they had to meet the deadlines, it was fantastic. It also demonstrates that we should be very proud of the future technical talent Nigeria has to offer.
The judges of Hackathon4Justice 2.0 were Andrew Okoh, Facebook Software Engineer, Gilberto Duarte, UNODC Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice Officer, and Omogbolahan Alli.
Alli said the engineering-as-a service company, Andela, hopes to make hosting Hackathon4Justice a regular on its calendar. He said, "We are grateful for our partners, UNODC and Facebook, as well as all the students that participated."
