Chatbot works to combat climate change

by Julia Renner

Most of us are aware that the time we spend in cars, on planes, and in other methods of transportation contributes to the carbon emissions that are causing climate change. And while there are methods for calculating the exact carbon footprint of a trip, they’re complicated and rarely accessible to the everyday traveler—and it’s difficult to know what you can do to offset your carbon footprint. Aunsh Chaudhari and Shail Shah are aiming to change this with a bot they produced at the recent YHack event at Yale University.

Chaudhari and Shah are both graduate students in the College of Computer and Information Science, graduating in 2018, and both have an interest in artificial intelligence and web development. “We’re always interested in building cool stuff and learning on the fly,” they say.

This year’s YHack hosted over 1,100 participants from across the globe from December 1 through December 3, in a marathon 36-hour event where some competitors took breaks to sleep and others worked straight through. Types of challenges that competitors could take on ranged from finance to educational and environmental issues.

Chaudhari and Shah describe the hackathon as an exciting, collaborative event where they asked fellow hackers and sponsors for help when they got stuck. Included were workshops, talks, and events to keep them engaged and entertained—their favorite was a rap battle tournament between competitors.

Chaudhari and Shah began the competition brainstorming ways to create an app that would have a social impact, and narrowed their focus to climate change, deciding that a bot would be an accessible and engaging model. “We built the messenger chatbot with Node.js and Heroku, the Facebook Graph API. Based on the user’s response, an appropriate response was generated. An API was used to calculate the distance between two endpoints (either aerial or road distance) and their carbon emission units were computed using it.”

The bot works by interacting with the user—the user sends the chatbot information about the distance they traveled and the method of transportation. The bot calculates the carbon footprint of their trip, and suggests options for donating to nonprofits that work to combat climate change.

“We wanted to build something that was fun to interact with and also something that would have a social impact,” the two say. “We were wondering how we could encourage people to lower or offset their carbon footprint. We figured that a smart bot would be intriguing to interact with and would attract more people to check out the content.”

Shah and Chaudhari hope that their bot will attract the usage of civic-minded consumers who are concerned about the impact of their carbon footprint—their intended audience is “anyone who travels and has the means necessary to donate a few bucks towards a greater deed. “This was our first step in trying to make a difference.”

As for moving forward with their work, “we are planning to take this forward by making the calculations more accurate and adding more incentives for users to donate,” they note. “We also want to make the bot smarter without affecting response time.”

Shah and Chaudhari snapped up several awards for their bot, including Top 8 Overall Project, Best Civic Hack, and Best Hack for New Haven/Leon Sister City Project Organization.