Winners from Google IoExtended Hackathon 2023 in Florida



Hackathon 2023

On behalf of GDG Central Florida, GDG Spacecoast, and GDG Tampa, we have the joy of announcing our winners for the Google IOExtended Hackathon 2023.   We enjoyed seeing our diverse community of developers connect with each other, brainstorm ideas, and roll up their sleeves to build some cool projects.   Across the board, I want to thank our organizers, Google developer experts (GDEs), and team members acting in generosity in their mentorship.   Through this experience, our community had the opportunity to gain deeper perspectives on AI and ML industry trends and work with the latest technology Google provides through its tools and apis.   It was cool to see teams reaching for Palm 2 API for conversational AI features.   Some teams enjoyed exploring pose estimation using TF.JS.  Several teams reached for ML models connected to computer vision.    

It’s time to celebrate our hackathon winners. 


Flutter Dash


In the first place, we celebrate team Flutter Dash!  Flutter Dash helps keep runners motivated during their workout by playing songs aligned to their heart rate and user preferences.   When you start your run, the user configures a goal time for the run, goal distance, and desired pace.   As the runner kicks off their run, the system can sense the user heart rate through a smartwatch APII.   Under the settings, the user describes their general music preferences for workouts and cooldowns.  The system uses the Palm 2 API, a Python backend, and the YouTube data API to select a motivating song aligned to your preferences and your heart rate.   This team had an awesome Google technology stack.  They leveraged Firebase for authentication and data storage.   The backend team leveraged Google Cloud run for hosting the Python API.   The mobile UX was implemented with Flutter.   




The team scored highest in the areas of innovation, teamwork, and execution.  Well done! 


Avatar Creator for Your Community 


In today's digital age, communities and conferences are increasingly turning to online spaces to foster novel connections and interactions among their members. In second place, the Avatar Creator for Your Community is a fun developer toolkit designed for community organizers.   These tools enable their members to create lifelike avatars of themselves for immersive online gaming and metaverse experiences. By harnessing HTML, JS and React components, this toolkit offers a seamless solution for community leaders to maintain their branding while allowing their members to build avatars of themselves.   This work is possible due to the RealPlayer.me developer API.  


You draft your avatar by taking a photo of yourself.   Using the picture, the RealPlayer.me platform configures an avatar ready for customization of clothing, hair, makeup, and accessories.   



One of the most exciting features of the Avatar Maker is its integration with Google Mediapipe technology. By leveraging pre-trained TensorflowJS technologies, developers can implement face mesh tracking, enabling avatars to react to users' facial features and movements. This functionality brings avatars to life, enhancing the sense of immersion.    The creator can evaluate the facial realism of their avatar using this use case. 



In future work, the authors will publish an open-source kit and documentation for implementing social avatars for your community events.   Members can use their avatars in original game experiences, animations, online games, VRChat, and Mozilla Hubs.  Since the RealPlayer.me tools create a GLB of the avatar, you can leverage the asset in a growing ecosystem of metaverse tools. 


Meet the team. 

CookGPT 

In third place, CookGPT is an innovative application aimed at tackling the pressing issues of food wastage and cooking-related stress. Every year, the United States wastes an astonishing amount of food, resulting in billions of dollars worth of discarded meals. Furthermore, a significant portion of millennials face stress related to cooking, and a substantial number of adults struggle to create basic meals from scratch. CookGPT is designed to address these challenges by harnessing the power of artificial intelligence to provide quick and easy recipes based on leftover ingredients. 








The application operates on a simple premise: users can take a picture of the ingredients they have in their fridge, and CookGPT's AI engine will generate a recipe using those specific items. This approach encourages users to make the most of what they already have, reducing food wastage and saving money. 



Users can upload a snapshot of their ingredients, and the AI system employs semantic image segmentation to identify individual items. The data is then sent to a pre-trained machine learning model to obtain a correlation score between the user's food items and items in the dataset. The result is a list of ingredients that match the user's input, enabling them to proceed to the next step. 


The second phase involves recipe generation, achieved through Google's Palm 2 API model. With some prompt engineering, the model is trained to generate recipes based on a given list of ingredients. The application then utilizes the Palm API to request a new recipe and its instructions, incorporating the ingredients from the earlier phase. 


Meet the team. 


To all our hackathon friends, we wanted to express our gratitude for your participation in this community event. We feel that each participant showed great creativity in their concept design and execution. Loved to see the culture of learning.

 

Special thanks to Christi Kapp and violetsgarage.com. We appreciate your hospitality and creative atmosphere. We’re thankful for your mentorship and your joy in community building. We do want to thank all the GDE’s who engaged with mentorship through the week. Your efforts are very appreciated. We had some amazing talks and enrichment throughout the hackathon. 

  • Flutter – Leo Farias
  • Flutter – Randal Schwartz
  • ML – Chinmay Jog
  • ML – Suvaditya Mukherjee  

Thank you, Google, for investing in our community through this hackathon. I’m excited to see how the seeds we’ve planted through inspiration and ideas will grow.   


To all our GDG organizers, big thank you. We challenged ourselves to create an experience that encouraged project-based learning and social connection. We value that we were able to accomplish this connection between Tampa, Spacecoast, and Orlando. Excited to see how this learning extends beyond the hackathon.


gdg.community.dev/gdg-central-florida






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