What is gnomi?

Gnomi is a news-aggregation app that displays a news article's political bias next and encourages users to get their news from a variety of view-points. It was deployed to both the Apple and Google Play stores up until May 2020.

Each article is graded by a machine-learning algorithm to predict political bias from either left (L) or right (R) and on a scale from 1-5, with 5 being extremely biased and 1 being centered. These combine into 10 possible "slants", ranging from L5-L1, R1-R5, most liberal to most conservative respectively.

We also used AI to group article together based on the story, so the user would be presented with two articles about the same thing from two different perspectives.

My involvement

When I joined gnomi in the fall of 2018, they had just built a MVP and were trying to get it approved by Apple for the first time. As it turns out, when you build a news aggregator, Apple get's really picky about copyright infringement. Probably a good thing.

The codebase at the time was a mess. I had to do a lot of work right off the bat to remove inconsistent styling, poorly defined components, and duplicate code. Fortunately, we were able to deploy version one of the app in January of 2019!

Over the next several months, I rebuilt the entire app from the ground up - this time following best practices and documenting everything as I go. I normally don't like to do this, but it is what it is.

I was the only developer onboard. I consulted with our UX person and our UI intern, but the entire app UI/UX was ultimately my conception. I strived to create an interface which was sleek and modern and not get in the way of the user.

I also updated and modernized the backend. I migrated everything to AWS Lambda and API Gateway via the Serverless Framework, which worked really well for the small CRUD operations the app performed often.

When our data-science intern left in May of 2019, I also took charge of the machine-learning platform. I'll be the first to tell you that I'm not a data scientist and it's not my strong suit, but it was a fun challenge. The goal was to create an algorithm that ranked political bias given a certain article using natural-language processing. I can't speak too much to the details here, but the algorithm I created performed well enough to be adopted.

Where is it now?

Gnomi was unfortunately shut-down in May of 2020 due to a lack of income amidst the COVID-19 pandemic.