Mobile app with SAP Cloud Platform machine learning ready in a night and a day?
German SAP had chosen Ackee as one of the five participants of a hackathon that run during the SAP CONNECT 2018 conference. The goal was to demonstrate what the teams were able to create with the new SAP Mobile Platform SDK and the whole SAP Cloud Platform.
SAP starting line
We arrived to Düsseldorf as a team consisting of a Designer, a Backend Developer, an Android Developer and me – Project Manager. The rules of the competition were pretty clear:
The app must be completely developed on-site.
The app should demonstrate the power of mobile SAP Platform SDK and SAP Cloud Platform.
While the SAP CONNECT 2018 visitors are asleep, we work hard to have the app ready in the morning.
Our solution to the networking app
After the opening briefing lead by SAP developer team we were told to design an application that would help the conference participants to network easily. So we sat down in our developer container and after a few concept iterations we came to a conclusion that there were three main issues:
- How to make people communicate with others?
- How to make the communication entertaining?
- How to measure the communication?
Make it funny make it rhyme
Our solution consisted of a scoring system, which gave points to visitors that communicated with each other. However, how to rate the meeting of two participants in the app? We were discussing using photos of QR codes from participants ID cards, but thats not really entertaining, is it? To encourage the participants to use the app more we wanted to make it as amusing as possible. That is why we used machine learning function of SAP Cloud platform that recognizes pictures.
During a meeting the two participants take a selfie together. Then, with the help of SAP services for face recognition and feature extraction the app compares the faces from the selfie with visitors’ profile pics and finds out if the users’ have really met in person and took the selfie. If yes, the app connects the users by sharing their contact details in the app. As a bonus they end up with a common selfie right under the saved contact details.
From design to programming
We started programming the app around 8 PM when we had finished the graphical proposal. We were working the whole night and the app was tested as functional at 2 PM the next day.
We had finalized all the basic functions:
- To display a list of participants.
- To create a selfie with a participant.
- To identify the two participant using machine learning.
- To create a new contact.
We dind’t win the competition but still it was an interesting experience and most importantly we had a chance to demonstrate what is possible to create with new SAP functions in relatively short time frame.
Did you find our networking app interesting? Look at its graphics or simply hit me up.
