Eventful launch to the year.
Global Challenge, Build Hackathon, the Line Experience, mindsets, AI takeover,recommended reads/watches and much more.
TL;DR
Recommending a product to Amazon Alexa to help Gen-Z build better habits.
Build ‘23 Hackathon: Creating an AI app prototype to reduce waste in U.S restaurants.
Building disaster support with GPT.
Must watch, and reflections.
In light of the breaks and the month-long Alexa Challenge, I decided to delay this version of the Newsletter to avoid a short and brief one for both months. Despite that, a lot of things have happened since January and I’m here to update y’all on all of it!!!
Before we start, heres a small photo dump from the past few months:
Recommeding solutions to Amazon Alexa
To start off, the end of February and the beginning of March were focused on the new TKS month-long Challenge. Previously, I and my team worked alongside a billion-dollar bank to recommend solutions to retain and gain more Gen-Z customers. The target problem was to create the next big product that Gen-Z would use daily in their lives. I and my team hence came up with AlexaMentor, to help Gen-Z solve tech addictions and build better habits.
The solution revolved around the habit-building foundation set by James Clear in his book, Atomic Habits. An active AI assistant analyzes screen time usage patterns, re-inforces restrictions, and constantly provides positive comments to help users achieve their goals. The end goal is to reduce overall Gen-Z screen time usage which is a huge killer of ambitions, motivation, and overall well-being. Pitching to a trillion-dollar company is a highly compelling task, and an experience to re-visit. Some of my takeaways from the project:
Importance of team dynamics and planning. A well-planned team attack on any problem can produce the best results, and this was observed in this challenge as I and my team tackled the complicated task in an organized and effective fashion.
Getting expert feedback, meetings, and user testimonials is very important in validating the solution to any problem in a project. We learned this the hard way as we lacked expert input in our problem as it had very specific targets. However, user testimonials strengthened our point and gave an overall better flow to our presentation.
BUILD ‘23
I and 4 other fellow TKS students voluntarily participated in BUILD ‘23, a hackathon catered towards students' passion for new and emerging technologies and positive social impact. We, as a team picked sustainability as a goal to tackle in the hackathon, and using the above-mentioned team dynamics came up with a solution to a problem.
First, we identified the problem of food waste in American restaurants as a result of excessive food ordering and residue. ⅓ rd of globally generated waste is from food through farming, industrial food processing and at retail and consumer stage. This is worth about 1 trillion dollars. Food loss and waste also exacerbates the climate change crisis with its significant greenhouse gas (GHG) footprint.
Our solution
We developed the footprints of a platform that’ll allow businesses to track and analyze their food waste data in real-time. This can help businesses identify inefficiencies in their supply chain and take corrective action to reduce waste. Using AI imaging systems that identify, excess food waste and carefully devises a plan that optimizes the best plans for ordering and consuming the exact amount of food without excess.
The slideshow can be found here and the one-page we created is linked here.
Disaster Recovery with the GPT AI.
As part of a GPT Hackathon, me and my team used the GPT API to create a disaster relief platform in case of a typhoon or hurricane. We specifically targeted Philippines as it is often battered by typhoons, putting millions of people at risk. In combination with Twilio, a communcation tool development tech, we leveraged GPT in a phone call systems that warns potential victims of upcoming typhoons, and provides advice and relief coordination during and post disaster.
ChatGPT prompt engineering and API development are some of the key skills needed in this age of AI, and getting hands on experience developing with the AI was an essential starting point in learning more about this vast field.
Here are the links to the slide deck, and the GitHub Repo. Credits to Ahmad Syahmi and Diyor Mukomov for the work on these.
Recommended Reads, Watchs.
Over the past few months, I’ve also been doing a lot of article reading and watching videos especially about the changes in the world in terms of economy and AI right now. Here are my top picks:
Videos:
Other resources:
Pause Giant-AI-Experiments, signed by Elon Musk, and a number of other influential people.
Things to look out for.
In the coming months, there’ll be a lot of content and things I’m going to be creating individually and with teams. One major thing to look out for is our Moonshot project where we use 10x thinking to create a sci-fi sounding project, and make it as real as possible. As well as that, I’ve also laid the barebones for a podcast called the Learning Lounge Show with a fellow TKS member. More Quantum Computing articles also coming as I finish my replicate. I’d look out for all these things to stay updated!!
Till next time, Peacee!! 😇