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.
Genesys Works
Genesys Works helps economically disadvantaged high school students to enter and thrive in the economic mainstream by providing them the knowledge and work experience required to succeed as professionals. The organization is dedicated to fostering a generation of diverse future leaders who can break the cycle of poverty. TechTeam will build a tool that allows Genesys Works to select internship company sites and identify the students living closest to these sites. Genesys Works stores student and company location data through zip codes, and the project involves using the Google Maps API to calculate transit time and distances. In the second half of the project, students will build a website that visualizes this data and allows Genesys Works to identify the nearest students to each internship site location.
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 will create a database of partnership (donor) organizations and relevant information (e.g. item(s) donated, location), design an algorithm to match donors with recipients, and create a front-end interface for donors and recipients to input their information. This project emphasizes skills in database creation and management.
Hope Chicago
Hope Chicago is a non-profit dedicated to removing financial barriers to attaining a college education for Chicago Public Schools students. It provides scholarships for students to attend summer school in order to get them on track for a 4-6 year graduation. Hope Chicago wants to better understand which types of students achieve the most success in summer school. TechTeam will perform data analysis to answer the following questions:
Which types of students were likely to be successful in summer school? What are their academic (and otherwise) backgrounds like?
How many students earned enough credits to bump them into an “on-track” status? What percentage is this of all students who attended summer school?
Given that some students were “successful” and others weren’t, what was the return on investment overall? Who was summer school “worth it” for?
TechTeam will also build a website that allows students to check their scholarship status and which requirements they have and haven’t satisfied prior to the disbursement date.
Government Blockchain Association
The Government Blockchain Association (GBA) is a professional network connecting people and organizations to develop blockchain technology-based solutions to problems faced by government entities. With partnerships with over 500 government agencies worldwide and a network of over 4,000 members, the GBA builds professional connections through its private web-based network, in-person events, and more. TechTeam will build a communications web app or enhance an existing readily available communication app for their network to facilitate real-time communication between members through both mobile devices and web browsers.