Food For All is a platform to connect NGOs, Foundations, Instituites and individuals to people, especially migrant labourers and daily wage workers, that require aid, supplies, survivial kits and most important FOOD. The platform is to help out the less privileged people that are stranded, isolated, in containment zones, are hungry and in need of basic humanatiaran help.
- Short description
- Demo Video - UseCase
- Demo Video - Technical
- Architecture
- Long description
- Project roadmap
- Live demo
- Built with
- FAQ
- Authors
- Acknowledgements
Problem Statement
- "If Covid doesn't kill you - Hunger will" That seems to be the heartbreaking reality for the millions of daily wage workers and migrant labourers who suddenly have no jobs and no source of income. If the most basic necessity - two square meals a day, are not met, they do not stand a chance for survival. This is the time that requires humankind to come together, united as one family, by caring for and providing for, the lesser privileged sections of the society that have been the foundations of our daily comfortable life.
- It requires the coming together of NGOs, governments, industries, foundations and the common public, both in terms of funding and distribution management, on the field, to the needy.
Solution Overview
- In order to provide the right kind of aid to the right people at the right time, we need to have access to the right information. We plan to use various sources like news portals, government communications, volunteer alerts to get the real time information of migrants/daily-wage workers location, in-transit information, government quarantine institutes, containment zones and extract that information to get exact location coordinates where help is required.
- This location information is then alerted to the nearest NGOs that have registered in the portal - who can choose to accept the call for help depending on their resource availability.
- If it is a moving target, like in-transit migrant labourers, the system will use tracking in real-time and predict where the targetted destination will be.
- Specifically to solve the stale food issue seen recently, paging out is done in a controlled manner, to the NEAREST NGOs so that food can be prepared fresh and there will no wastage, as the required number of NGOs are only paged and there is no overlap.
- Our solution is a one-stop socio-technical system where we connect the givers to the exact location coordinates of seekers.
This will be a technical description of the solution.
Step 1. Data Sourcing
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Watson discovery is an enterprise search engine that can comb through a unstructured "document collection" and retireve the relevant information based on a search query criteria. The document collection that we have used for building the solution is the standard open news portals and webpages. Some of the sample search query strings that we have used for demo are
- "migrant labourers india"
- "containment zones"
- "government quarantine"
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The results of the query are in the JSON format with relevant snapshot passages and the link to the news portal. For example
{"id":"43n8kjT2J9iDSfShiBm-Tbct_3RDKPlhhuvK5-iGvimrGsGq7MJ23CelkoqpNVcl","result_metadata":{"score":13.553546},"text":"Kolkata: Bihar migrant workers return to Patna from Ernakulam via a Special Shramik train during the extended nationwide lockdown, on May 4, 2020. (Photo: IANS) A 1000-bed facility being contructed at the exhibition ground in Mumbai's Bandra Kurla Complex to provide quarantine and isolation facilities for non-critical COVID-19 patients during"},{"id":"iIJskt42jTul79P790Kv11j3cykUlb8kwzlkiaztvg1DfyaW9MOAZ5Qrqnvn_AbG" -
Storage - For data storage we plan to use MongoDB for JSON data and DB2 for final transactional data for the web portal.
Step 2. Data Parsing
- From the JSON data, named entities such as the LOCATION (
Kolkota, Bihar, Patna, Ernakulam, Bandra Kurla Complex), DATE (May 4th, 2020), QUANTITY (1000) are extracted to construct meaningful and accurate information about WHERE exactly help is required and by WHEN. - This requires NLP and Text Analytics to extract the right information. For example, from the above snippet - potentially, only the migrant workers require help. The second news item is just informational news about the preparation of facilities by the government. We plan to use Watson Natural Language Processor to do the extraction. For the purpose of demo, we have extracted information manually.
Step 3. Data Analytics
- From the previous step, we have arrived at a set of locations that require help. We need to next infer the nearest NGOs, (say within 20 KMs) so that they can be alerted for help.
- This requires geocoding and spatio-temporal analytics to find the "nearest neighbours" within the specified radius.
- We have done this using IBM Watson Studio's python notebooks and using Spark as the runtime.
- The data is then plotted on a map for visualization.
Step 4. Data Visualization
- We have developed three visualization charts using IBM Cognos Dashboard that will reflect real-time data about the following. This will help to understand visually the trends and patterns.
- a. NGOs enrolled on the platform
- b. Locations Seeking Aid
- c. Supplies Needed at a Location
Step 5. Web Portal
- This is the user interface portal for the stake holders such as the NGOs and the portal admins to login and check for help requests and take action. It gives a display of the location, quantity and due date for the items. Action can be taken by NGOs to accept the call or deny if they are unable to fulfill the request.
- The webapp has been developed using ReactJS and deployed on Cloud Foundry. Design uses IBM Carbon components that offers a unified and integrated user experience.
- There are 3 links in the portal:
- a. AdminView - This is the screen that appears for the Admin of the platform - who will be able to see overall call for help across the country. After initial verification, depending on the urgency and other such critera, the admin can choose to alert the NGOs either at a local level (within 50 KMs) or national level (if the resources required are larger)
- b. NGOView - This is the screen that appears for the NGO that has enrolled on the platform. They will get a notification if any alert comes to hem requesting for help. They can review the request, and based on their resource capabilty accept to help or deny if they are not able to.
- c. Dashboards - This is the charting that we talked about earlier in Step4. It shows the trends and patterns that gives the user a quick overview across the country.
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In the last three days of the hackathon, we have had time only to demonstrate the main key features that shows the flow end to end. Our vision for making this a complete platform includes (but is not limited to) the following:
- Watson Machine Learning - for predictive analytics for accurate predictions on the locations and quantity of help required.
- Mobile App - that will be complementary to the webapp
- Citizen Volunteer Alerts - Connecting individuals to the platform.
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We also plan to build in more content around the acknowledgements for the work done by capturing the joy of receivers whose demand were fulfilled so that it creates a positive feeling and encourage people to give-back to society.
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LONG TERM VISION
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While the motivation for this project was to address the migrant labourers solution, we realize that it can help in more situations that will only increase in the coming days. There maybe slums or areas in city that are sealed up because of increasing number of positive cases, containment zones, border quarantine camps etc where people may not have proper access to facilities. We should complement the government's efforts with more helping hands to handle the unprecendented need for aid.
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Even after the pandemic is over, there will always be situations when we will need one another. The seeker and aid provider collaboration platform will help in any disaster situation.
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Service Providers like Amzaon , Flipkart can also come in the picture to deliver essentials in the area. Infact amazon has already a Donation Box service https://www.amazon.in/Essentials-Box-Donation-Provides-meals/dp/B0874W97YZ that partners with Akshay Patra(AP) for delivery. This can be expanded for including more NGOs by connecting through the FoodForAll platform.
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http://food-for-all.mybluemix.net/
Go Ahead! Try it out! Don't forget to look at the dashboard too! :)
Driven by TechHearts, Powered on IBM Cloud
- Watson Discovery
- Apache Spark on Watson Studio
- React JS Web App deployed on IBM Cloud Foundry. Design uses IBM Carbon Components
- IBM Cognos Dashboard
- Cloud Object Storage
Coming up in the roadmap...
Q. Why is the platform called FoodForAll when you have other supplies too? A. Food and water are the basic necessities; What drove us to this idea is seeing heart-wrenching pictures of families with kids and elders walking in the hot sun for days together and lying in a collapsed heap at the end of the ordeal. The name FoodForAll appeals to that ethos in every human being. At the same time we recognize the power of the platform - it can be used as a distribution system for more than food - anything from survival kits, sanitizers, medicines and all other supplies. So we demonstrated the full capability in our demo.
Q. What happens if multiple NGO accept a same request? A. Once once NGO accepts a request, the state of the request changes to "Accepted", so that other NGOs are aware of it.
Q. What if an NGO is able to fulfill only partial request like say 100 out of total demand of 1000? A. We plan to build in functionality for specifying the quantity that can be fulfilled when the request is accepted.
Q. What is the Long Term Vision of this platform? A. Please read about our long term vision here
Shruthi S Rao for mentoring on the interface of the UI