SecondConscience

SecondConscience is designed to be a deterrent for the young, potential bully, who may try to attack another child anonymously behind the safety of his or her screen. It provides a second chance for that child to decide to retract a message with cyber bullying sentiment before it is posted, acting like a second conscience. We decided to create software that is meant to be integrated into the back end of various social media platforms to help with the current cyber bullying issue. The software will ask a user if they are sure they want to post a message if the message sentiment correlates with common cyber bullying statements.

We are a team of students from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). We were originally brought together for this project for HackIllinois 2018, the University of Illinois’ annual hackathon, where we devised the first version of this software. The positive reception of our concept by judges, University faculty, fellow students, and onlookers prompted us to truly recognize the importance, relevance, and necessity of the work we accomplished. Our use of Microsoft’s APIs to implement our idea made us eligible to compete in the Imagine Cup. We saw this as an opportunity to simultaneously get feedback on our project and to broadcast this idea to the world.