Click here to see the video of the Prototype
Click here to see the presentation slides
Trashoon is a project that four students of the University of Gothenburg created during the CS&E Hackathon 2019
As waste and particularly plastic is a rising problem for the existence of many species all around the globe, including our species, we decided to find a solution to tackle this problem, or at least raise awareness about the topic.
When brainstorming we all agreed that our goal was to make the strongest impact to the eyes of people.
That because the more impact we can make, the more we would make people reflect about the problem and make them by consequence aware of the fact that we actually have a serious problem.
That's how we came up with the idea of creating a map containing all the pictures of trash around the world as markers, showing their position.
Pretty simple but what is there so special about it? You may ask.
Well, first of all the way we gather these pictures.
Our idea is to automatically mine for pictures containing large amounts of trash on the internet. The way we do it is to jump between related pictures of trash on an image search engine (like Google Images) and then confirm that there is trash in the image by using Image Recognition (we tried using the Google Vision API) to then add it to the map.
That's not it though, we also extract informations about the place the picture has been taken using Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing from the websites the pictures come from.
The result is (sadly) stunning, a world map full of pin points with related pictures representing trash.
The future of Trashoon is still unknown to this day, there is no certainty for a follow-up and a further development of the project.
But as our team is engaged in the environmental questions we may continue the development and deploy a stable and working version of Trashoon,
Stay tuned!
Cheers,
Team Trashoon