Official submission for Cambridge Atlas 2022!
"Investment Meets Sustainability"
YouTube Presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y56kefZocyI
Inspiration: We were inspired by the COP26 conference in Glasgow. As Scottish University students, the conference significantly marked our reality and its end results illustrate the disparity in sustainability. As information regarding the company's overall sustainability is limited, we wished to create a clear ranking to educate investors and students.
What it does: EcoVest ranks over 13,000 companies according to overall sustainability. By analyzing the Monetization Factors for Corporate Impact on the Environment, this website presents the most sustainable companies. The main page also includes further articles on the topic to educate the user. The user's page permits them to register a company they plan to invest in. The website categorizes the inputted company according to its environmental impacts and consequently presents ways the company could improve its ecological footprint. Moreover, companies with higher sustainability than the inputted company are presented and recommended.
How we built it: The website is created using HTML, CSS, JavaScript and Flask. It runs on a server to enable access between all members. We initially researched the topic and brainstormed. With a member online and the rest physically present, we drew website designs and prototypes to organize our structure and course of action. We split the team into two major focuses: web development and data analysis. The data analysis team collaborated on a GitHub repository and sourced the data set from Kaggle. We utilized Jupyter Notebook and applied knowledge from our data science modules to create an algorithm to use environmental parameters to categorize companies in tiers. The web development team used Flask to create the login and register pages. With CSS it designed modular input of the forms. The main page includes a slideshow of recent articles to educate the user. The second half of the page presents our rankings of the top companies and how our model works. The user index pages include a form to input data for the potential company. Once the form is submitted then the final page presents the tier the company is in and using CSS and Flask depicts the company's sustainability rating and more sustainable companies.
Challenges we ran into: There were issues in running and connecting the servers amongst the team. Moreover, the CSS proved to be challenging with various components working simultaneously. The PowerPoint posed issues with the modular login and register pages. Likewise, the algorithm had tedious casting issues that were properly accounted for.
Accomplishments that we're proud of: We are proud of the visual layout of the page and the algorithms ability to filter companies into tiers. We are especially proud of the number of languages used and its ability to work coherently on one server.
What we learned: We refreshed our CSS and HTML skills. Learned the implementation of Flask and some Django and how to start up a web server. Moreover, we learned how to design algorithms on our own. In class, the instructions specify the required output and illustrate the steps required. In this project, we learned how to structure our thought and code to be able to fulfil the long term objectives.
What's next for EcoVest: The next step for EcoVest is to be further updated with more companies. Also to filter companies according to country, and user input goal. We wish that the user can input their current portfolio and our algorithms can be applied to present high sustainability companies that complement existing assets and fulfill the user's impact goals.
Built With: css, flask, html, javascript, jinja, kaggle and python