EQUAL - Space Apps Challenge

EQUAL| Better Together

Better Together

Your challenge is to create a tool, app, or resource that helps close a gap that causes people to experience inequality. This combination of humanity and technology should eliminate or lessen a systemic issue and educate the user so they can grow.

DontBeRacistWith.us

Summary

The world has racism, conscious, and unconscious. It is rooted in our cultures. Discrimination happens on a planetary scale, but it is distinct in forms and concepts. DontBeRacistWith.us is a social web platform where people from all over the world can share and expose prejudiced situations, phrases, words, and jokes that somehow hurt them. With the sharing of this information, we want to create an extensive database tagged and geolocated to make different people aware of situations that may sound offensive. We need to become more inclusive and not take this type of behavior when we go off-planet. The confined space of a ship requires complete trust and collaboration without bias.

How We Addressed This Challenge

With the advance of the pandemic caused by Covid-19 in the world and the growing social distance, situations of intolerance gained prominence in the media. Intolerance of racial prejudice is one of them. The assassination of George Floyd sparked worldwide movements and protests that made everyone question, "Am I racist?" (13). "Am I a racist?" was the most frequently performed search on Google for at least 90 days. And if we had a way to become more aware of the subject and practice empathy when faced with reports from real people who daily feel offended and embarrassed by attitudes that are often embedded and rooted in our culture.

However, the search for more information such as "I am racist" is transitory. As the media reduces its coverage of the issue, the issue is out of people's interest.

From this observation, the idea of reversing the proposal arose. Do not ask if "I am racist", but "I felt racism". It was from this premise that DontBeRacistWith.us was born, a social web network where people can share these embarrassing situations and mark identification tags. The app itself registers the geographical coordinates for use in a grouped, non-individualized way. This care guarantees the user's privacy, eliminating the possibility of identification and retaliation.

The tags are, in principle, grouped by type: situation (phrase, action, reaction, etc.), region (city, state, country), place (school, work, public transport, etc.), actor (police officer, teacher) , student, public official, etc.), and each post may indicate one or more tags of each type. These publications can be viewed by searching for “recent” or “main publications”.

As a social network, our solution allows us to mark solidarity with others through “like” reactions. However, despite being a social network, viewers do not know who posted, although they can follow them.

As a final result, the data creates a world heat map, with an overview or segmented by tags and geolocation. The monitoring of these situations can be carried out in real time worldwide. These data, in turn, can serve as a basis for decision-making and actions by the government and NGOs in order to seek to reduce the presence of racist practices by regions / environments / locations and others.

The objective is to expose racism and prejudices in order to understand each other's experiences and perspectives, in order to make a society much more aware and promote access to more constructive discussions on the topic, with the purpose of dismantling structures that systematically harm some and benefit others. We want a more egalitarian and empathic world.

How We Developed This Project

Our premise from the beginning was to work with something that is causing a lot of pain in the world. Racial prejudice is a theme that haunts humanity for a long time and makes many victims every year. Nowadays, in a globalized society, the discussion on related subjects has proved to be very significant and important. In addition, with the imminence of new long-term exploratory space travels, with close and confined coexistence in small spaces, the theme is of vital importance for its success.

The issue of racism is deeper than it seems, since many people, in their daily lives, have in their behavior common attitudes that end up hurting someone, not always intentionally, but simply because they do not have an empathic look at the issue and at the other individual, so rooted in his routine and way of thinking, inserted in our culture many decades ago.

After verifying this information gap and the lack of globalized databases on the subject, the approach became which mechanism could generate better and greater details about the problem. Identifying regional and global problems on the topic, where everyone who suffers from some kind of prejudice, whether racial or not, can expose their embarrassment without risking reprisals but receiving solidarity from those who have already experienced the same situation. In return, we have assembled a database that promotes information, education and awareness of those who want to learn more about the subject and their actions. Promoting self-knowledge about racial prejudice, listening to those who suffer the most and knowing the real reports of those who live with prejudice on their skin.

One problem faced was really allowing us to know more about the topic. It is easy to see that someone at some point ended up being racist, using a racist term or even playing racist games, and through this we identified that because it is something inserted in our culture and society, it does not have due attention and on countless times it is discriminated against when confronted. There is clearly a lack of information and education on the subject.

The tools for the execution of the project are the existing ones (programming languages, database structures, applications for mobile devices, text localization concepts, etc.). In the consolidation, analysis and study part, mathematical models of artificial intelligence will make their contribution.

We use Figma for prototyping and design of our platform.

The front end are shown below. A simple app/web that the user post some situation or see what others posted.

The platform frontend was made in React, the API in Nodejs with Express, the database was made using Postgresql, using OpenCage API to identify the user's location (city / country).

The hosting was in the Heroku environment. The domain was registered through the GoDaddy offer (dontberacistwith.us).

Another problem faced is the issue of user privacy. The concept of social network would leave the user exposed, so we followed the path of anonymity. On the other hand, the engagement and solidarity of other people is an important greater incentive for participation. The solution was to use the concept of social networking for posts and “likes”, but taking care to restrict the personal details of those who posted.

The web platform talks to a RESTful API that handles everything on the back stage of the application. When a new post is made, the platform will send a request to the API, that will verify if the post structure is valid, then it will store the user post in a PostgreSQL database.

Posts are anonymous and the only data dontberacistwith.us stores is the user city and country names, since that’s the data required to be plotted on the heatmap later on. To get the user location, we first request their position using the browser geolocation API and then requesting OpenCage for their reverse geocoding API.

The posts will be translated if needed, and then go through a sentiment analysis process using IBM’s Natural Language Understanding API.

Frontend: React --> https://dontberacistwith.us/

API: nodejs + express

Database: Postgresql

Service: OpenCage API (location)

Visual Dashboard: IBM Data Visualization

Translations & Sentiment Analysis: IBM Watson Natural Language Understanding

Machine Learning Models: IBM Watson Machine Learning -> used to understand the matter and patterns

How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project

The articles, videos, infographics and materials listed in the challenge resources were the basis for understanding the problem. Reading a lot of them give us the dimension of the matter.

In particular, some passages were outlining the idea and directing the work. Difficulties, studies, situations show the complexity of the subject. This is not a study of mathematical rules, laws of physics or the behavior of atoms. Complexity comes from human nature itself, with its millions of years of evolution.

Canada's open data (12), which are of enormous value for studies, is a small fraction of the sample and little representative when thinking globally.

From the material, some excerpts are highlighted.

A phrase from the article “Racism and the George Floyd Protests” (4) makes clear this need to understand the issue: “Today, and every day, everyone must do the hard work and have challenging conversations to expose racism and bias and understand each other's experiences and perspectives. There are no simple solutions. But we must have constructive dialogue and work to dismantle structures that systematically disadvantage some and advantage others. ”
In the article “Microaggressions Matter” (1) the simple and direct phrase: “When I was studying at Oberlin College, a fellow student once compared me to her dog.”. Still in this same article, the author says “I, too, have sometimes made what turned out to be deeply offensive remarks unintentionally. “
Dr. Brene Brown's lecture (2) mentions “connecting with people is what gives our life purpose and meaning”.
The list of questions in "Infographic: How to Combat Unconscious Bias as an Individual" (9)
The exciting story of racism and overcoming in a high level environment at NASA: Ruth Bates Harris (6).

Project Demo

Video presentantion:https://youtu.be/ey1auG8ghO0

Narration: A word, a look, a gesture, even unintentionally, can hurt. And what is considered aggressive in each culture, in each region, in each religion? How to recognize what offends, what hurts? The creation of an app that allows tagged and geolocated reports by those who feel humiliated can provide a database that allows a comprehensive, diverse and historical view on the racial issue. We can do it. Better together!

Web:https://dontberacistwith.us/