Hack Midwest 2014 Recap

Originally published on the Clarify.io blog. View archived copy.

Last weekend we participated in the third annual Hack Midwest in Overland Park, Kansas hosted by the Kansas City IT Professionals. Like

A few things made this event stand apart from many other hackathons.

First, was the sheer number of students. There were students from across the Midwest ranging from Mizzou just a few hours away to UPenn on the other side of the country. There were so many student teams that there was even a Best Student Team prize.

Next, was the breadth of the projects. While there was the traditional dating website – a favorite among college students – and a social jukebox using the Rdio API, there were a variety of others. There was also a creative HTML5-based mobile quiz game that asked questions about songs as they played.

But the best overall project was from a group of students building on the AR Drone API. They used the Face++ API with the Drone’s camera to detect faces and identify gender, ethnicity, and other demographic information. For their demo, they manually walked the Drone around the room pointing it at the audience. The results were immediate and impressive.

Finally was the creativity of the Clarify API Winning project. Being relatively new to public speaking, the team wanted to understand how they stood as speakers and how they improved over time. Therefore they took a simple audio recording and looked for “filler words” like um, so, like, well, and similar. In the speech analysis space, these are referred to as “speech disfluencies” and vary from language to language.

By looking at the recordings, they were able to first count the number of disfluencies in any audio clip and then determine what percentage of the recorded time was filled with the disfluencies. The concept was that over time you would be able to track your own performance and watch the trends as you used words more or less commonly. It was a clever hack that we hadn’t considered.

All pictures courtesy of Mashery Developer Network. Used with permission.