In January, Amazon Web Services (AWS) launched its annual education and hackathon event—AWS Hackdays 2019, themed “Hack for Good”–with the goal of empowering the community of Southeast Asian developers to drive positive change using AWS technologies.
Participants were invited to develop solutions around four key topics: HealthTech, AgriTech, Smart City, and FinTech. Builders in the region showcased their innovation and demonstrated their skills in Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning, Internet of Things (IoT), Data Analytics, or Modern Applications.
Teams had access to the broad spectrum of AWS services and tools such as Amazon Sagemaker to build, train, and deploy Machine Learning (ML) models; Amazon Polly to build speech-enabled applications; and Amazon Lex to build chatbots. Other AWS services include AWS IOT services, AWS Lambda, AWS Data Analytics, and Modern Applications such as Serverless Technologies, Microservices and Continuous integration and Continuous deliver (CI/CD).
The hackathon, for the first time ever, was conducted online across six Southeast Asian countries including Malaysia. Participants submitted their entries via Agorize. Five teams were selected to participate in the national Demo Days on 27 March 2019, where the teams were given the opportunity to pitch their final projects to a panel of judges consisting of AWS and other expert judges in the startup/innovation space.
Entries are judged on originality and creativity, user experience, feasibility and potential impact, and how the solution integrates with AWS services.
Each winning national team get to represent their country and compete in the AWS Hackdays 2019 Grand Finale in Singapore on 10 April 2019. From then on, the winning regional team will receive a paid trip (airfare, accommodation, re:Invent tickets) to AWS re:Invent 2019 in Las Vegas.
The five Malaysian teams that qualified for the offline Demo Day pitch were:
Park Smartly (SmartCity) – Demo Day Malaysian winner
The four-man Astro Malaysia team came up with the idea to solve parking woes in busy cities. Its Park Smartly smart parking solution uses data-driven insights to provide users with parking trends, real-time parking availability with remote and advanced booking features.
By using IoT parking sensors, the mobile application gives users an overview of available parking spots and even includes an integrated e-wallet payment option for added convenience.
Teralons (SmartCity)
ioHomes is the Teralons team’s communication tool that allows integration with IoT devices to keep neighbourhoods connected. Targeted at neighbourhood communities in third world and developing countries like Myanmar, the mobile-driven platform gives neighbours the ability to chat with each other, post updates and events, monitor neighbourhood surveillance cameras, alert suspicious activities, and also post advertisements for free.
MoveMalaysia (HealthTech)
The AI-based virtual trainer solution, developed by another Astro Malaysia team, helps users reach their fitness goals through exercise programmes with celebrities on Astro. The mobile-based app helps users keep track of daily exercises, correct bad diet and sleep habits, curate exercise plans, and recommend suitable fitness programmes. It also uses face recognition to identify different users.
Find Recycler 2 (SmartCity)
The web app helps users locate nearby recycling facilities and incentivises the habit of recycling through varies reward features. The system uses a sponsored and semi-crowdsourced model to populate its recycling facility directory. Users can locate the nearest facility location using GPS and digital maps, and be rewarded with points or cryptocurrency (ETH) for recycling.
SupremeTech (HealthTech)
Allergy Bot is a food journaling app with a difference—it uses a conversational style of input via a chatbot to log what a user eats, record allergy triggers, retrieve allergy food prediction and consult historic data.
Astro Malaysia’s Park Smartly solution impressed the judges and emerged as the Malaysian hackathon winner. The team will represent Malaysia in the Grand Finale at AWS Summit Singapore.
“We’re really looking forward to compete in the finals! We will work towards refining and further enhancing our solutions to be fully functional by the time we present it in Singapore. We’re confident that we can achieve more by making use of the tools and innovations from AWS like the serverless architecture, which allows us to scale our solution seamlessly,” mentioned Park Smartly.
For more details on AWS Hackdays, visit https://aws.agorize.com/en/.
