Info Ninjas| What Is Our Carbon Footprint?

What Is Our Carbon Footprint?

Your challenge is to identify local sources of carbon emissions and/or estimate amounts of carbon emissions for different human activities to aid scientists in mapping carbon sources and sinks. How can you inform decisions to adapt to the consequences of a changing world and aid policy makers in making plans for the future?

Interactive Carbon Footprint Analyzer

Summary

A multiplatform conversational AI system that can analyze and calculate the carbon footprints of individuals. The system collects data via conversation from users and gives the carbon footprints instantaneously. The system is built in a reusable way which can support a wide array of platforms from Facebook messenger to embeddable chat application for independent web apps.

How We Addressed This Challenge

The idea is to give awareness to the public in a convenient way, which educates them to reduce carbon footprint. The realization of each point counts is the key, and quantifying day to day data makes this easy by showing the impact. The platform agnostic way of implementation increases the reach of the application, which ultimately helps deliver better results.

How We Developed This Project

Carbon footprint is very important but less understood concept. Our aim is to educate people on the importance of reducing carbon footprint to make the world a better place. We used Google's DialogFlow platform to build a conversational AI. We chose this technology because it support wide variety of platforms and it's advanced AI capabilities. We also made use of Google Cloud Functions for our backend system and utilized NodeJS for coding it. We chose this stack because of it's scalability and extendibility. We ran across various problems related to conversational flow building. We did extensive research to sort them out. Another challenge was to derive formulas to calculate carbon footprints. Resources from NASA also helped us materializing the idea.

How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project

The first resource we made use of is the video on "Virtual Bootcamp Video/Introduction: What Is Our Carbon Footprint?" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwTV8TQJadY) which served as the backbone of our ideation phase. Then we looked in data sources ODIAC Fossil Fuel Emissions and DARTE US Traffic Emissions, which served as the base for the formulas we used for carbon footprint calculation. https://climate.nasa.gov/causes/ gave us more information on causes, which also helped us creating our prototype.

Project Demo
Data & Resources
  • Virtual Bootcamp Video/Introduction: What Is Our Carbon Footprint? (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwTV8TQJadY)
  • https://climate.nasa.gov/causes/
  • DARTE US Traffic Emissions (https://daac.ornl.gov/cgi-bin/dsviewer.pl?ds_id=1735)
  • ODIAC Fossil Fuel Emissions (http://db.cger.nies.go.jp/dataset/ODIAC/DL_odiac2019.html)
Tags
#artificial intelligence, #carbon footprint, #chatbot, #coversational ai, #ai
Judging
This project was submitted for consideration during the Space Apps Judging process.