#WinnerSeries NutriViz
HackDavis is the first major collegiate Hackathon at UC Davis completely run by students. We’re providing a platform to bring together the most talented students in California to address the world’s most pressing social issues.
Our featured team for this week’s #WinnerSeries is NutriViz, composed of graduating UC Davis students Sailesh Patnala, Vibhav Altekar, and Akhil Mehra.
Motivated to make their marks before graduating from Davis, the team sought to build a project that would inspire people to make a change in their daily nutritional habits. With their teamwork, they built an AR application that could project nutritional facts of foods just by taking a picture of it with your camera. We got to talk with Sailesh, Vibhav and Akhil about how they made their application, their inspirations for the project, and their advice for other hackers!
What school are you from?
Akhil: “We’re all 4th-year CS students here at UC Davis.”
What was your project?
Sailesh: “Our application was basically an AR application where you hover your phone camera over the food you’re eating and it projects a graph showing how many carbs, protein, and fat is in your food. Those are the three things we chose to display for the project. We can probably extend that in our application.”
Why did you create this? What was your inspiration behind this project?
Akhil: “Our inspiration was self-health. We wanted people to start eating right. It’s to show people what they’re eating. One case is when you’re eating at a restaurant. A lot of people don’t know exactly what they’re eating so this could definitely help with that.”
Vibhav: “With the rise of all these tech products like the Apple Watch and Fitbits, people want to see what they’re putting in their bodies, while also having a clean user experience. What’s the easiest way to find out what you’re eating? Take a picture of the food.“
What tools did you use in creating your project?
Sailesh: “The main tools we used were Xcode to create the iOS app, Inception V3 for object detection, and AI depth cloud. We used a nutrition API, though I‘m not sure about the name. We also used ARkit to create the graph.”
How did the theme of “coding for social good” shape your hackathon experience?
Sailesh: “We wanted to build something that would help people. We know there are three parts to the theme of HackDavis and [Health and Wellness] is the one we wanted to target.”
Vibhav: “To follow that, the theme really helped us combine the use of API’s and technology as the driving factors behind our project.“
What was your favorite part of HackDavis?
Sailesh: “The thing I like about hackathons in general is the atmosphere. It’s just the energy you see from people trying to build something.”
Akhil: “The environment is really cool, free food is awesome, and venue is really nice.”
Vibhav: “The base thing I like about hackathons is that we move away from in the box thinking. In class we just follow the professor and do homework, but in a hackathon you have to take a complete 180 turn from that. You have to come up with new ideas, hopefully, trying to make a big impact.”
What are some valuable skills you gained from HackDavis?
Sailesh: “Just being able to pick up something so new and being able to demo the final product. There’s nothing to hard too pick up. You just gotta work hard, fight and grind through.”
Akhil: “One thing I learned was how important it was to have good communication. If you wanna be successful, you have to be able to pick up good communication habits.“
Vibhav: “The communication factor was really crucial when we had to divide tasks. I think communication was got us over the line at the very end. It took us the whole 24 hours to finish the product.”
Do you have any advice to hackathon newcomers?
Sailesh: “You have to be open to the ideas. Be willing to learn and play around. In general, you can ask people for help. In a hackathon, there are a lot of bright minds so don’t be hesitant to ask around.”
Akhil: “Expand your horizons. You’ll be surprised with what you’re capable of.”
Vibhav: “You have to get comfortable with being uncomfortable with things. You have to be comfortable with throwing code in places. Have the motivation and willpower to keep on trying.”
“You have to get comfortable with being uncomfortable with things.” - Vibhav Altekar on advice for hackers
Tell us a fun fact about your group!
Vibhav: “One of the fun facts of our team is we had three or four products at the end. One that picked out your celebrity look-alike. One that had a mug follow you around. There was one where you could place an object, and if you turned around, it would still be there. The last one was one that could predict your age, but it wasn’t very accurate. We only decided on the nutritional value application later in the competition. Each one of us was just playing around.”
Sailesh, Akhil and Vibhav won the award for Best Use of Intel AI DevCloud by Intel in HackDavis 2018. These talented group of Davis students were able to win big through their great group dynamic and teamwork. Watch out for HackDavis 2019 and you and your friends could win cool prizes just like team NutriViz!
Tune in for more news from HackDavis! Like our Facebook page at facebook.com/HackDavis, and follow us on Twitter at @hack_davis. Interested in applying/sponsoring? Go to hackdavis.io for more details.
