Imagine browsing the web and reading an article about an unfortunate event, like a flood, the spread of a disease, or an earthquake. You are moved by the news and willing to help by donating to NGOs, but finding the ones actively working on that issue can be difficult.
WAP “With A Purpose” is a startup idea developed for the European Innovation Academy (EIA), held in Turin in 2019. Our aim was to make the donation process easier, so I developed a browser extension that could detect the topic of the news article you were reading and quickly provide a selection of NGOs you might want to support.
The browser extension was just the visible part of a larger system involving a private cloud server and third party APIs.
These were the phases:
- the user is reading a news article about an issue
- the user clicks on the WAP extension icon
- the extension sends the URL of the article to a private cloud hosted API server
- the server sends a request to a third party API which performs topic extraction over the article
- the server, using word2vec, computes the semantic similarity between the NGOs keywords and the extracted topics
- NGOs are ranked over semantic similarity and the highest ranking ones are sent to the extension
- a short list of NGOs is displayed in the extension popup window
- the user can select one and initiate the donation process
Here you can see a real demo we recorded. We were browsing an article about hunger; after clicking the WAP extension icon, we almost immediately received a list of NGOs working on hunger issues. Selecting one of them let us easily begin a donation process.
This project took 15 hours over 5 days, with no prior knowledge of developing browser extensions or using NLP techniques.
We needed a prototype in a few days to showcase the feasibility of the idea, so corners were cut: including, yes, butchering a random browser extension found on GitHub.
In the end, among over 50 startups, WAP was selected in the technical top 10.
