Food Waste Watch
Data Science
Interactive and narrative-focused dashboard and data visualization exploring food waste patterns across the United States.
My team won best project in a data visualization course (182 students) for this project.
Of note is that everyone was allowed to use AI, and so everyone’s projects ended up being quite polished, but we still came out on top. In a world where everyone has access to AI, the main differentiator still seems to be in the ideas you have as a human and the way you prompt your AI agent. Maybe this will change in the future, but as of writing this in 2026, this is the reality.
The middle part where there’s a long scroll to really hammer in how much food is being wasted? An LLM didn’t come up with that idea. We did. Along with the comparisons to real life objects, the dashboard, the miscellaneous statistics. All ideas by us.
While AI was used heavily as a tool for execution and code generation, the whole design and direction of this visualization project was still very thoughtfully directed by us humans, and I think that’s what made our story stand out.