[Original post by Tyler Nappy, Developer Evangelist for HP Haven OnDemand.]
It says it all in the title – this past weekend, we kicked off our involvement in the AngelHack series of hackathons spanning 50 cities throughout the summer. We’re super excited to be a part of the upcoming AngelHack events, so keep a keen ear to the ground on projects and other stories this summer! Oh, and did I mention this past week was my first week here at HP as a Developer Evangelist! What better way to kick it off than heading down to the city of Austin in the Lone Star State for the first of many AngelHack hackathons to come.
The Event
Martin Zerbib and I arrived at Capital Factory Saturday morning to setup our booth, meet the hackers, and give our opening statements. The following two days were filled with Sphero racing, nerf gun shooting, and working with teams using HP IDOL OnDemand’s APIs. Use cases and software stacks ranged from dating apps to job hunter helpers, from oldschool C# to the all the rage Nose.JS. My man Martin gave a workshop on using HP IDOL OnDemand’s APIs which helped keep the creative juices going throughout the event.
On day two of the hackathon, we gave out some Spheros to the participants using a lottery like system, so everyone had a chance to get one! For any of you who don’t know what these are or haven’t tried one yet, you should totally check them out. Not only is it a remote control ball, it has an API to connect to so you can create your own hacks with it.
When the buzzer sounded and hacking was done, it came time to decide who would win best use of HP’s APIs. We had a tough decision ahead of us with so many awesome hacks using us. Here are a few that stood out:
Armed with a Samsung Gear VR, these hackers decided to create a virtual dance party filled with familiar faces,
thanks to the HP Haven OnDemand face detection API. While walking around this virtual rager, the user can control the dancing virtual characters around them via the Myo armband (If you haven’t checked out the Myo armband, you should because they’re awesome. It’s an armband worn on your forearm that detects hand motions and gestures). So pretty much plop on the Samsung Gear VR, start the program, and have the time of your life dancing the night away!
Gone are the days of uploading a resume to a job site to have it lost in the ether. Techruiter’s app intelligently categorizes job boards and postings using the HP Haven OnDemand text analysis APIs to make it easier for job applicants to keep track and find new career opportunities. Another fun feature of the app allows for candidates to upload a video of them interviewing predefined questions. This video is then analyzed for particular character traits using the HP Haven OnDemand speech to text API and HP Haven OnDemand sentiment analysis API which can then be used by the company’s HR to prescreen viable candidates.
If you’ve been to hackathons, you know there is always one team that creates an app that has Tinder-like functionality (swipe right if you like this, swipe left if don’t like that). Blink, however, took the Tinder concept and put a spin on it. Rather than rely on the superficiality of pictures to determine a like or not-like, the soon to be love-birds video-chat in real-time! If the conversation is going great, the user can hit a button to add more time. If the feeling is mutual and the other person has pressed the button too, time is added to the conversation. To avoid the notorious Chatroulette mishaps, Blink checks to make sure there are actual faces and not R-rated body parts using the HP Haven OnDemand face detection API.
Reminiscent of the movie Her, this team set out to create an AI that listened to not only voice commands but also the tone and mood of said commands so Alice could get a better idea as to how to respond. Like a glove, the HP Haven OnDemand speech to text API and HP Haven OnDemand sentiment analysis API were perfect fits for these problems. Curious about your stocks? Simply ask Alice and she will pull up your portofilio data and trends. Forgot to turn the lights off before leaving your house? Ask Alice to switch them off. But remember, ask nicely or she might not assist!
Some people are still a bit shy to login to Yelp and leave their feedback for that restaurant that has that awesome sandwich. To solve this, this team hooked into Twitter’s API to leave reviews via tweets with the dash of our HP Haven OnDemand sentiment analysis API to know the reviewer’s emotion.
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The team that took home the gold for the best use case of our APIs was team ‘Alice is Awesome’! With such an awesome demonstration of human-AI and IOT interaction, each team member was awarded a GoPro Hero 4!
The team that took home first prize for the entire event, awarding them the opportunity to go through Hackcelerator, a 12 week accelerator program for small startups that gives them mentorship and the resources needed to help them succeed, was Blink. Can’t wait to see how your project grows!
See you all at the next AngelHack event!
[Original post by Tyler Nappy, Developer Evangelist for HP Haven OnDemand.]
