UC Open Data: Chicago Grocery Stores

This project used the dataset from the Chicago Data Portal on grocery stores and updated it with data from the Google Maps API to show the availibility of food in different Chicago neighborhoods. It is overlayed with preterm birth rate data from the Chicago Data Portal. The main tool in this project is openlayers.

Source: https://ucopendata.org/Grocery-Store/

Chicago Loot Drop

Chicago Loot Drop is a non-profit organization that partners with UChicago Comer’s Children Hospital to donate toys and games to children of all ages. TechTeam created a database of partnership (donor) organizations and relevant information (e.g. item(s) donated, location), designed an algorithm to match donors with recipients, and created a front-end interface for donors and recipients to input their information. This project emphasized skills in database creation and management.

Mandala South Asian Performing Arts

Mandala South Asian Performing Arts strives to promote both the classic and contemporary dance, theater, and musical arts of South Asia. Each June, they host the Mandala Makers Festival throughout the Devon Avenue neighborhood in “Little South Asia,” Chicago, supporting multidisciplinary South Asian performing artists. In collaboration with the City of Chicago, they developed a new project to place QR codes on CTA bus stops which riders can then scan to view musical recordings and stories from the festival. TechTeam created a website to display the recordings and generate the QR codes associated with each recording/story. In addition, TechTeam implemented additional pages on the site for a calendar of festival events as well as an interactive map of the festival bus stops.

Mandala South Asian Performing Arts

Mandala South Asian Performing Arts strives to promote both the classic and contemporary dance, theater, and musical arts of South Asia. Each June, they host the Mandala Makers Festival throughout the Devon Avenue neighborhood in “Little South Asia,” Chicago, supporting multidisciplinary South Asian performing artists. Prior to the main festival in June, they have smaller events in April and May. Before the June festival, they would like to collect demographic data on the festival audience during the April and May performances, including age group, socio-cultural background, etc, as well as qualitative data such as audience feedback on the festival. TechTeam (1) developed sign-up forms or surveys that attendees could fill out during the April and May festival events, (2) analyzed this demographic and festival feedback data to gain further insights about festival attendees, and (3) created relevant visualizations that Mandala Arts could then use in future funding reports. In tandem, members also analyzed publicly available data about the Devon Avenue neighborhood through publicly available sources such as the Chicago Data Portal.

Uzbek American Association of Chicago

Uzbek American Association of Chicago (UAAC) is a Chicago-based community non-profit organization dedicated to serving the needs of underserved Central Asian American communities in the Chicagoland area. TechTeam expanded their webiste to include basic features such as: informational pages, sign up and subscribe features for events, and connections to UAAC social media pages. More advanced features included: writing blog posts via email, a donation system, and a learning management system for the UAAC children’s school. Technical work involved a combination of working with Content Management System tools and writing HTML/CSS into the website.

Anti-Human Trafficking Intelligence Initiative

The Anti-Human Trafficking Intelligence Initiative (ATII) is a US-based nonprofit that aims to disrupt the market of human trafficking, child exploitation, and child sexual abuse material (CSAM) through the advancement of prevention, detection, investigation, and reporting mechanisms. The ATII develops methods to collect and use OSINT data (including online businesses, email addresses, phone numbers, postal addresses, domains, names, and accounts) to help financial institutions link suspicious activity alerts to human trafficking and related activities. TechTeam created an automated parsing tool that scrapes provided links and extracts and cleans data, creating a relational database of intelligence. This involved the following: (1) crawling clear web and dark web sites, using a MySQL database to store information such as usernames, emails, phone numbers (2) extracting site info such as domain whois and SSL certificates (3) performing basic analytics with OSINT APIs to find connected information and (4) creating a keyword cloud of commonly used keywords between sites and pages.

WHPK Radio

WHPK Radio is a community-oriented radio station based in Chicago, known for its eclectic programming and commitment to diverse musical and cultural expressions. Operated by volunteers, it serves as a platform for underrepresented voices and genres, ranging from jazz, classical, and blues to experimental music and talk shows. As a beacon of community media, WHPK Radio plays a crucial role in fostering local talent and engaging listeners with content that challenges, entertains, and educates. WHPK Radio asked TechTeam to add more functionality and make the website easier to administer directly from the site. TechTeam ported the site from PHP to NodeJS, enabled easier content management and administrative functions directly from the website for WHPK Radio administrators, implemented a live video streaming page, and added analytics functionality to gather insights on user behavior and content performance.

Reproductive Transparency Now

Reproductive Transparency Now (RTN) is a registered 503(c) non-profit, volunteer-run organization that engages in operations focused on protesting and raising awareness about anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs), which create harmful barriers to abortion access in all 50 states. One of RTN’s tasks is to manually record citations from informational pamphlets to identity commonly-cited articles and investigate potential misuse of citations and associated claims. To accelerate this process, TechTeam will create a program that uses scripting, Google Drive/Sheets APIs, and other methods to automatically catalog pamphlets, citations, and any relevant information. If possible within the allotted quarter, TechTeam would also like to provide functionality to generate a visual “network” of the relationships between citations, their authors, and the pamphlets that cite them.

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The Love Package Project

The Love Package Project is a non-profit initiative under Chicago Birthworks that delivers monthly packages for expecting & <2 years postpartum Black mothers and parents across the Chicagoland area. Currently, Love Package receives requests through individual form submissions that must be manually processed. TechTeam will create a centralized database to store form submissions and write a script to automate the process of storing form submissions in this database.

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American Veterans for Equal Rights

American Veterans for Equal Rights (AVER) is a national charter-based non-profit that is dedicated to the promotion of equal rights for LGBT veterans and active service members. TechTeam will make a website or app that allows veterans to document their stories by recording and uploading videos of themselves speaking. This is currently being done over Google Drive, and AVER is seeking to streamline this through an app that veterans can use to more easily record and submit their videos to be stored in Google Drive.

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Genesys Works

Genesys Works strives to provide pathways to career success for high school students in underserved communities through skills training, meaningful work experiences, and impactful relationships. It currently uses a service called Hello Insight, a youth program that tracks students’ college and career readiness as well as social and emotional learning. TechTeam will conduct data analysis and generate data visualizations to help Genesys Works understand 1) the rate of improvement of young professionals’ Hello Insight scores 2) the relationship between Hello Insight Scores and training and internship success.

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Genesys Works

Genesys Works strives to provide pathways to career success for high school students in underserved communities through skills training, meaningful work experiences, and impactful relationships. TechTeam will build an Azure Cloud database and migrate existing data on student degree attainment and enrollment from excel files to the cloud. In the second half of the project, TechTeam will tabularize the data and conduct data analysis on factors contributing to degree attainment and enrollment.

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Anti-Human Trafficking Intelligence Initiative

The Anti-Human Trafficking Intelligence Initiative (ATII) is a US-based nonprofit that aims to disrupt the market of human trafficking, child exploitation, and child sexual abuse material (CSAM) through the advancement of prevention, detection, investigation, and reporting mechanisms. The ATII develops methods to collect and use OSINT data (including online businesses, email addresses, phone numbers, postal addresses, domains, names, and accounts) to help financial institutions link suspicious activity alerts to human trafficking and related activities. TechTeam will create an automated parsing tool that scrapes provided links and extracts and cleans data, creating a relational database of intelligence. This involves the following: (1) crawl clear web and dark web sites, using a MySQL database to store information such as usernames, emails, phone numbers (2) extract site info such as domain whois and SSL certificates (3) perform basic analytics with OSINT APIs to find connected information and (4) create a keyword cloud of commonly used keywords between sites and pages.

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