NomadNari

Category details

The gender equity category this project is breaking barriers towards:
- Women and girl’s safety
This project aims to combat United Nation's Sustainabilty goals
- 5.2 - Eliminate all forms of violence against all women and girls in the public and private spheres, including trafficking and sexual and other types of exploitation.
- 5.B - Enhance the use of enabling technology, in particular information and communications technology, to promote the empowerment of women.

As an elder sister and a best friend, I have two very close single women in my life who travel solo, but rarely because it has takes months to even plan a single trip, hours of reading reviews, and hours of double checking each and every location, route, and accommodation.
There are currently apps that help women travel together and help other solo travelers when they think they might be in danger but there is currently nothing out there that creates a safe trip guide for women.
A survey of 400 U.S. women found that two in five had experienced sexual harassment while traveling alone. Sexual harassment is the most common gender risk for solo female travelers. ([https://www.researchgate.net/publication/344631063_The_Dark_Side_of_Solo_Female_Travel_Negative_Encounters_with_Male_Strangers])
NomadNari aims to eliminate the time it takes to research and provide women with a list of safe locations they can follow up on and choose from instead of thousands of options which lead to time wasting, headaches, and fear.

Research shows that traveling alone can offer several pros, including: increased self-confidence, personal growth through self-reflection, greater flexibility to tailor your itinerary, deeper immersion in local culture, opportunities to meet new people, improved decision-making skills, and a sense of empowerment by taking charge of your own experiences; essentially allowing you to discover more about yourself and your capabilities in a new environment. ([https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13683500.2024.2362380#:~:text=Exploring%20the%20benefits%20of%20solo,et%20al.%2C%202017).])

The user inputs their preferences into the form including location, travel dates, accommodations, transportation, previous experiences, travel, etc.
Based on the data user inputted and prompt engineering, the Gemini model generates a personalized travel guide for the user

NomadNari is built using a modern techstack. Nomad is currently made with Python.
We started with a survey, we asked our friends and family that travel solo, how would they like to be helped while planning their solo trip and what resources would they like to see.
The most suggested answer was a condensed list of safe places for them to travel to, so they dont have to waste hours reading up reviews. Hence, the travel guide - NomadNari.
We used the google-cloud-aiplatform Python package, and enabled the Vertex AI API and used the vertexai SDK, that allowed us to use Gemini through the gemini-1.5-pro model.
We then picked streamlit to support the front-end.
After through testing and updates, we deployed the application to Google Cloud Run.
Google Technologies used - Gemini, Vertex AI API, Cloud Run

As a millennial woman who graduated high school a couple of plenty years ago, Im only used to in-person hackathons. I personally faced difficulties with securely a team at first by going ghosted and then when I finally got into a team 3 times time after time with folx of complete opposite timezones on different topics but unfortunately everyone happened to back out due to their own personal reasons or time constraints which I understand, because life happens to all of us.
November 6th, when the last team didn't work out, I decided to roll up my sleeves and found the right opportunity to do this project for my loved ones.

Utilizing AI to do good and try to make this world a safer place for women.
Utlizing AI to give women the confidence they need to travel solo.
Utilizing Google Cloud Run to deploy the application.
Testing pre-production and post-production.
Being able to get back up and keep on trying to achieve our mission of providing a trip guide even after facing challenges.

We learned how conveniently we were able to use the google-cloud-aiplatform package to utilize Gemini while giving a specific data!
We also learned about the open-source Python Streamlit where we can turn Python scripts to web apps, as a full-time back-end engineer, I found this framework very convenient to work with as well. And I hope to contribute to this open-source package as well.
We learned that if we keep on going, no matter what, it is possible to reach to your goal.