Women in AI Hackathon- Bringing Solutions to Real World Problems

This weekend I was able to participate in my second hackathon, this time with Women in AI.

"Women in AI (WAI) is a nonprofit do-tank working towards gender-inclusive AI that benefits global society. ​Our mission is to increase female representation and participation in AI."

During the hackathon teams were tasked to co-create a pitch of a startup idea that solved one of the UN SDGs. Those SDGs were focused on health, education, clean energy, and reducing inequalities. With a combination of work, mentor, and speaker sessions, teams were to develop a viable pitch that features AI, ML, or data science in solving one of these or other UN SDGs 2030. The pitches were then judged by a panel of experts.

As participants, we were asked to choose what SDG we were interested in working on. As a former educator, my obvious choice was the education SDG, however when teams were later announced I found myself with the health and wellness team. Many other participants were asking to move to the SDGs of their choice. I considered to do as well, but I also realize that as a professional UX Researcher and Designer I need to remain open and flexible. I am so glad that I did.

I found that I was working with an incredible team. There were four on our team- Ousema, Delia, Sydney, and myself. We began by brainstorming viable options for our pitch. Delia offered the idea of applying AI and machine learning to farming, by placing sensors in fields to monitor soil conditions, moisture, growth, pests, etc. That raw data then becomes cleaned and analyzed, sent to the farmer in the form of a dashboard with at-a-glance data, with the insights sold to food distributors, grocery chains, etc. In exchange for the data to help improve farming decisions, farmers pledge to donate a percentage of their crops to food insecure communities.

In a mentoring session with the wonderful Syrine Sahmim, who is a startup mentor and teacher at the The Higher Institute of Information and Communication Technologies - ISTIC, we were able to cement and formulate our plan further. Syrine is a blockchain expert, and the end goal in the tech stack is to include the data in the public blockchain to enable it to be analyzed and sold for profit. This part, I admit, is difficult for me since I have no experience with this side of the technology.

We then researched the problem further, and then divided the work accordingly. I took on the designing of the dashboard that farmers would use to receive the data insights, started the pitch deck design and the one pager the "company" would use to sell their services to retailers. Delia developed the business and tech side. Sydney completed personas, helped me with the one pager, managed the information for the pitch deck and presented. Ousema continued with research and compiled next steps for the "company."

For my side of the pitch, I started with low fidelity designs for the dashboard specifically created for tablet sized screens. I did this because I knew a tablet would be handy to carry while working on the farm, while also having a large enough screen to see the information. In a future iteration a responsive mobile screen may be added, but I felt that the screen might be too small to really see much of the information.

Coming from a farming family and community, I knew many farmers managed multiple fields with multiple crops. Data would need to come from all fields, and be divided up as such. This informed my decision to place a nav bar using data from each of three fields along the left side of the screen, with an option to view "more" as necessary.

Initially the dashboard was designed with nine smaller cards, each with a separate designation such as weather forecast, water levels, fertility, pH levels, etc. and the final one for market prices. Due to how little time we had to present (three minutes), I did not drill down further in my designs, but ideally a tap of each card would allow the farmer to drill down further into each set of data, but the dashboard allowed for the communication of real-time data in an at-a-glance setting.

Once I presented it to the team, an iteration was suggested where instead of nine cards, I present six and then at the top give insights such as days to harvest and alerts.

Once this was approved by the team, I began applying style and color palette. I wanted a clean, modern look to represent this futuristic-type application and program. I had completed the lo-fidelity in Roboto, and decided that I liked that look already, so I simply looked for a font that paired well with Roboto to use for the title. I also looked to the team for an app name and business name. It was decided to call the company IntelliFarm, and the application Crop Advisor. I chose Encode Sans for titles because it paired well with Roboto and maintained that crisp, clean look.

After an initial struggle choosing a color palette that I liked, I decided that this would be a good app to try my hand at dark mode design. Using the website Dark Mode UI: the definitive guide by Atharva Kulkarni as a guide, I went with shades of dark blue as a neutral yet trustworthy base for my screen along with some lighter, bright blue sparingly as an accent. Even though dark mode had not been my first go to on this design, it did make the most sense as many farmers might choose to carry their tablets with them as they work and the dark mode would cut down on sun glare and eye strain.

Even though we chose to cut down on the number of insight cards from nine to six, I still wanted to present that information in a manner that would be easily digestible for the farmer. The easiest solution would be to use cards that scroll through the common information, i.e. any cards related specifically to soil conditions I set to one card, and then rotated through the related information such as fertility and pH factor. I also decided to rotate through marketplace prices as well.

Here is what the dashboard looked like in prototype form.

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/19e4c6_416c0bfcaf2643cb9e5b52c53a32a6aa/1080p/mp4/file.mp4

On day three of the hackathon, Sydney and I finished the one page marketing flyer to present to retailers and the team compiled our information into the pitch deck.

One Page Marketing Flyer

Later that afternoon, we presented our pitch to the judges.

 I am proud to say that our pitch placed second in the competition.

The weekend was also filled with a lot of speakers from various companies like Intel, who helped sponsor the event. I was able to attend most of the speakers on Friday, but missed out on the events planned for Saturday, and the final keynote speaker on Sunday due to prior engagements.

Although since this is the first hackathon by this organization, and it had glitches along the way, I have to say that I still enjoyed my time and loved my supportive team. I made a lot of new networking connections, I was able to try a design style I had not done before, and I have grown in my ability to consider and justify my design choices.