Congratulations to Artur Isac, our Junior Software Engineer in Chisinau, and his team for winning the “Anti-Trafficking Hackathon”, organized by OSCE in Moldova, November 6-8, 2020.
The “Anti-Trafficking Hackathon” was organized by “Generația NIKA” and „Yep!Moldova”, in partnership with the OSCE Mission in Moldova, in the context of the European Day against human trafficking and the latest changes brought by Covid-19 regarding children’s online security. The purpose of the competition was to drive the development of viable software/hardware solutions that can be effectively applied to prevent and fight against human trafficking and online child abuse.
We are happy to celebrate Artur’s success in the 48-h online coding contest. He and his team of 4, all student or junior software developers, took on the project of creating a software application for detecting and analyzing hidden text and visual ads targeted to recruiting potential sex victims.
The application developed by Artur’s team uses Google Cloud Vision and Google Cloud NLP to detect dangerous content. Result would scale from 0 (absolutely safe) to 1 (absolutely dangerous), with statistics displayed on a different server (statistics page).
On a technical level, the application consists of a Google Chrome extension which sends information to main back-end server, Kotlin back-end for data processing and aggregation and simple front-end server on Vue. One of the killer features of the application was the notification and alert option which enables parents to receive SMS alerts or even calls in case of dangerous activity detected in their children’s online activity.
From the 9 participating teams, Artur’s project was selected the winner and differentiated through relevancy, ease of use (web-based application supported by any browser and mobile device) and the stage of development. The software they presented is an already functional prototype which is only a couple of mandays away from a final open-source free product.
We asked Artur about his choice of technology for and outside this project:
“I had never used Kotlin before but I was curious about it, it is very suitable for web deployment. Also the internal Kubernetes training I attended at work in R Systems Computaris came in very handy for this project. On a different note, I’m very curious about Machine Learning and next I’m planning to sign up for a global hackathon themed ‘Code for Peace’, with the mission to protect civic population during conflicts.”
We wish Artur the best of luck in the future competitions and we encourage his enthusiasm and passion for technology, as well as the drive to apply knowledge and skills into products with significant impact in the life of others.