I have a thing for Hackathon. I am a procrastinator. A lazy and procrastinator graduate student, not a nice combination to have. But still when I see hundreds of sharp minds in a room scrabbling over idea, hungry to build and prototype their idea. Bring it to life, it finally pushes me to activity, makes me productive.





TL;DR: if you just want to try the extension, chrome version is here and Firefox version is here. That is why I love Hackathon, that is why I love HackRice, our resident Hackathon of Rice University.





I have been participating at HackRice since 2014, when I think for the first time it was open for non-rice students, and have been participating ever since. What a roller coaster ride it has been, but that is a story for another day.

HackRice 7.5 being the last one I will be able to attend at Rice, it was somewhat special and emotional for me.

Hackrice 7.5 starts now! HackRice 7.5 was a tad different form the other iterations. For starters it was the first time it was being held in Spring semester, and hence on a smaller scale and only to Rice Students. And also instead of normal 26 hours, it was exactly 24 hours. The venue was Liu Idea Lab. I have never been to the lab before, and it seemed to be a nice place to sit and work. The event started on Friday evening and ended on Saturday evening. The event had two tracks, with a beginner and a Data Science track. The organizers had two in depth workshop/tutorials set up for both of these tracks to help out starters. Which I though was really cool. Even though I was brainstorming and prototyping on something different, I sat through them anyway and felt they were really thorough.

Being a one person team, and not really knowing anybody else I decided to work on a relatively smaller project which I can finish instead of trying anything in Data Science track. The idea I initially had was of a privacy filter. After some more brainstorming realized to properly make one, taking account of all anonymizing factors it probably will take me more time than 24 hours. I decided to settle on more of a toxic/malicious/sanity/trigger word filter.

The Idea: Create a browser based extension that can filter out abusive posts, word, sentences paragraphs.



Inspiration: Lately a lot fo us have started noticing the rise of cyber bullying and abusive behaviors across the internet. Be that reddit or facebook group. Often I see it gets me rallied up just before I goto sleep. Often I wish if only I did not read that. Recent increase in cyber bullying is one of the primary reason for the tool. Mental health and online harassment are major, relevant issues today in our current society. Everyone should be able to access content in the internet without fearing for trigger words or harassment. And that goes specially for the people who have been victim of such incidents and really doesn't wish to see any such trigger words.



What is uFilter: uFilter is a smart web extension made to help people browse the web without seeing content they don't like to see. Bringing the power to choose what to see back to users. The user has a list of buttons as filters they can choose. Either individual or more than one at a go. The process is simple and subtle: check off the type of content you want to avoid and let us handle the rest! Questionable content is blurred out, if you wish to see it nonetheless you can click to reveal the text.

You can see it in action here:





