Girls Who Code at OCC: AI4FinancialGood Challenge Project. We are a female only team from Orange Coast College, actively working within our community to support, uplift and drive other women towards success!
The introduction of publicly available AI tools like ChatGPT, Siri, and Grammarly in the past several years has revolutionized the way we work, learn, and communicate. With so many rapid changes, it can be hard to know how to approach topics or areas AI has impacted. For this Challenge, we want you to focus on how AI might be used to empower people in a very concrete way that affects all of us – money. Imagine a tool that uses AI to help people make better decisions with their money. What would it do? Who would it help? What data would it use? How could it address some of the financial inequalities that currently exist in the world? In this Challenge, we want you to dream big! We want to be clear - you do not have to create an AI tool. Rather, we want you to think about the design and decisions that would go into making this tool. Your final product should:
➔ Support people with their financial needs, whether that be budgeting, saving
money, debt, taxes, or anything else!
➔ Aim to address issues of inequality that currently exist
➔ Incorporate the use of AI as a key element of your solution
- Integration of AI: AI is fully integrated into the project as a key element of its functionality. Ex. The project would not function without AI.
- Financial Impact: The project clearly shows how it would help people with their finances in an effective way. Ex. The project clearly outlines a detailed solution that includes detailed analysis on the positive financial impact it would have on people.
- Social Justice: The project clearly demonstrates an understanding of inequalities that currently exist and how it seeks to address these inequalities. Ex. The project clearly outlines a solution that includes detailed analysis on how it would address inequalities that currently exist.
- Originality and Creativity: Project demonstrates substantial originality. Ex. Product combines ideas in a unique way not previously done before, and reflection questions demonstrate thoughtful intention on differentiating it from what currently exists.
- Reflection: Project includes thoughtful responses that fully answer the reflection questions.
Key Component: Her focus is filling the educational gap of financial insecurity, especially with women and those of lower income.
What would it do?
- Fy is your AI financial guide. Ask her questions regarding your finances, and she will provide you with educated answers on how to navigate the financial world!
Who would it help?
- Fy would help everyone come to better financial security, particularly fighting the educational gap of financial information.
What data would it use?
- She uses no user-data.
How could it address some of the financial inequalities that currently exist in the world?
- Most financial insecurity comes from a lack of financial awareness and education, particularly in minorities. Thus, she is a free-to-use, light-weight application that anyone can use. It provides the user with pre-determined questions in order to provide them with knowledge they possibly do not know exists.
How does your project use AI to help people with their finances in a way that hasn't been done before?
- By using AI to answer pre-determined questions that the user may not be able to come up with themselves, it gives a more hands off approach for the user, which is in stark contrast to other applets. It assumes the user knows very little, in order to specifically target financially illiterate minorities. Not only that, but it specifically targets women, in order to close the gender gap in wages.
Describe a challenge you faced. How did you overcome it? How did you reach out for help?
- Using an external library that requires C++ 17 meant that we could not use Github codespaces or the Replit environment, as they both use older C++ versions. We spent hours discovering this fact, utilizing websites such as google, stack overflow, and the like in order to come to this conclusion. We tried to solve it by upgrading them both, but were met with certain obstacles. This was overcome by using a rolling-release linux distribution, Gentoo Linux, or modern IDEs, VS code. Understanding the compiler keychain, version, and Long Term Service (LTS) linux distributions (like Codespace's Ubuntu LTS) really added to our knowledge of how different systems work together. Also, it emphasized the pros and cons of developing using older C++ standards for legacy systems versus utilizing modern C++ standards.
What did you learn from this process that will impact the way you interact with technology in the future?
- Knowing how different environments work was a hard lesson to learn. Moving forward, we realize we would be better off using IDE's or terminal environments that are not hard-locked to a certain release.
Why did you choose this format for your project?
- As for the language, we wanted to work with C++ as it is our preferred language to write in. Because it's suited for low-level programming, it is very powerful. But, without the abstraction of higher level languages, simple tasks are difficult, especially text parsing. As for the project itself; a console-application approach was key to us. It creates an interactive console menu that anyone can use on any computer. By doing this simplistic approach, it requires very little financial cost to use. Then, it is full of questions the user can choose from, without them needing to conjure up the question themself, so if they are completely uninformed, they have a great starting place. In addition to this, we have specifically included a section about female financial issues, to not only target financial minorities, but also gender minorities, as well.
Project video demonstration: https://youtu.be/95dlm2GQI80
Leader:
@kpowkitty
Group Members:
@huynhkatrina
https://github.com/D7EAD/liboai C++ bindings for OpenAI API
https://github.com/nlohmann/json JSON for Modern C++
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