drAIn

Framing the Problem

What is the problem you are trying to solve? Who does it affect?

The rapid growth of Artificial Intelligence has led to an immense increase in water consumption, with the United States wasting millions of liters alone! As society becomes increasingly dependent on AI in everyday life, the environmental cost continues to grow. Much of the water used to in cooling data centers is lost as vapor, placing a strain on already limited local water supplies.

This issue effects everyone! Those especially impacted include communities facing water scarcity, ecosystems where wildlife rely on freshwater resources, and regions with limited water infrastructure. Beyond environmental consequences, this growing waste also raises ethical concerns about how technological innovation can responsibly coexist with the natural world.

Idea Explanation

What is your idea? How does it fix the problem?

Scrumpty Dumpty's solution is drAIn!

drAIn is a sustainable alternative to traditional generative AI models, designed to raise awareness about the environmental impact of Artificial Intelligence. As AI has become an integral part of our world, trying to eliminate it is not a realistic solution to reducing water waste. Instead, drAIn encourages users to engage with AI responsibly by giving back to the environment.

As users interact with the chatbot, the virtual water reservoir gradually depletes with each prompt, visually representing the hidden water costs of AI usage. This demonstrates to users how AI usage affects the environment. The refill page allows users to replenish the water with donations, everyday tasks, and educational resources. AI isn't the only thing that wastes water, so we encourage users to make up for AI water waste by improving sustainability in their daily lives.

Users can also interact with the "Learn More" and "Progress" pages, where they can analyze their water usage and conservation efforts. The Learn More page provides users with a graph displaying how many AI conversations that certain eco-actions can offset. The progress page analyzes each action the user has completed and refills the virtual water reservoir.

Overall, drAIn transforms blind AI usage into meaningful actions that help sustain our environment while adapting to a modern climate!

Implementation

How do all the pieces fit together? Does your frontend make requests to your backend? Where does your database fit in?

Our frontend makes requests to our backend when the user creates an account. Once the user signs up, the user's name, email, username, and password all get stored into a SQL database that can be referenced when they log in. Users can only log in if their information is already in the database, hence they must sign up first. This system allows user progress to be saved and provide a personalized experience.

Challenges

What did you struggle with? How did you overcome it?

We encountered a variety of challenges that enabled us to think critically and work together to solve our issues. One issue we overcame was the process of merging code in GitHub. To ensure safe code merges, we added branch protections, requiring pull requests before being able to merge into the main branch. However, with the four of us working simultaneously, issues were bound to arise during these merges. Nonetheless, we took the time to understand why issues with commits and merging were happening, and thus learned better coding practices from this experience.

We also overcame issues with implementing our AI chatbot when utilizing our API key. Most of us were fairly new to using API keys, so when it came to pushing changes with the code, we learned the importance of storing this key in a secure location to prevent compromise. When launching our site, we also struggled with adding this key to Render, our deployment site.

Lastly, we dedicated significant time and attention to creating the virtual water reservoir and its movement, and despite the issues we faced, we are proud of the final design! We overcame the issues of the background not displaying correctly by researching what kinds of shapes and movement you can create with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Referencing our concept art made in Canva also greatly helped bring our vision to life.

Accomplishments

What did you learn? What did you accomplish?

This experience left each of us with meaningful insights and hands-on learning that went beyond just building a project. Learning how to use API keys was a great takeaway that each of us will now be able to apply to other projects and our future careers. Additionally, learning how to deploy a project that uses Flask and SQL onto the web gave us a deeper understanding of how to bring a concept to a real-world application.

Our project also required us to research deeply about AI water waste and water conservation as a whole. Upon completing the project, we were left with an increased knowledge about the water of our world and the importance of keeping our environment healthy. Completing this project left us with a renewed appreciation for sustainability and the reminder that innovation should never come at the expense of our environment.

Lastly, we continued to develop good coding practices and learned how to compromise regarding differences in ideas and opinions. This experience strengthen out teamwork, communication, and problem-solving skills.

Next Steps

What are the next steps for your project? How can you improve it?

Though we are extremely proud of the project we have developed, we recognize there are still improvements left to be made and are eager to continue development even after the hackathon! As of now, our project can only be accessed through the web, but we would like to also deploy it as an app so that users can use it on-the-go. To make the site more community-driven, we also aim to introduce leaderboards where users can compete with one another to stay motivated in their sustainable efforts. We'd also like to implement a feature that doesn't let the user continue to use the AI chatbot after they've run out of water. To keep the project updated and stay in tune with recent events, we will add new resources and links for users to enjoy. Looking ahead, we hope to develop our own AI chatbot to create a more personalized and unique experience for our users.