Technology showcase day

What a day! Payoff time for 2 semesters of hard work for graduating students of Electrical engineering and Computer engineering departments of San Jose State University. 650 of them, to be precise - got together at Students Union building at the campus. I advise a group of computer engineering and Software engineering students on their Master's projects every semester, but this semester was a special one. I advised on 4 different projects, they have one thing in common - they are all using AI and Machine Learning to solve a business or social problem. I am so happy to be part of these 4 teams that I feel proud to be advocate of their work.

Cognitive Nutrition Data Analysis for Diabetics

This is a very innovative work my students did in collaboration with an Fremont based health and nutrition startup called ZenLoop founded by Vidhu Dashora. The ZenLoop mobile app (available at play store soon) curates nutritional plan based on user's blood glucose level. This app promises 1-click nutritional access that will provide a thorough history of blood glucose data along with food suggestion and overall analysis of its ongoing impact on the condition. The ZenLoop team is currently rolling out the app in 2 hospitals and 4 doctor's offices India and UK and aims to collect as much data possible to improve the app and its algorithm.

ConsumeSafe

Food safety has always been an important issue. ConsumeSafe is a Brand WatchDog for consumer products across the market. The app notifies its users about product notifications based on their interests, previous purchase history or based on a browsing history. The app also acts as a preventive measure to spread awareness quickly before the products get recalled from the shelf. You would be surprised with the statistics these students have come up with their 9 months of research and collecting all the recall data from public datasets. It doesn’t come as a surprise that China is also the country of manufacturing with the largest Recalls. What’s more surprising is that China based products account for 41% of all recalls across the United States. - the ConsumeSafe team claims. Currently, this app works with Walmart products. As a consumer, all you have to do is scan your Walmart receipt and app keeps tab of your purchase and its recall by US CPSC and notifies and alerts you.

QuikrBot - Grievances Redressal bot for Smarter city

How many times you have seen a stalled car on a highway, or a fallen tree on the street, but not sure who to report this incident to or even if you do tweet about it, you are not sure if the appropriate authority will pick that tweet and take immediate action. This team of 4 motivated students implemented on the idea of empowering common people to take action and ensure their voices are heard. When you see a problem all you do is tweet with the picture using hashtag #QuikrBot The data retrieval API continually checks for the tweets with the hashtag and perform analysis on the message using IBM Watson NLP and NLU. This helps categorize the problem and identify the appropriate authority. Finally, QuikrBot system responds to the tweet tagging with corresponding authority.

Botman - Readymade Chatbot for your business

AI powered chatbots are showing great promises for businesses of all kind. IBM Watson Assistant and similar services from Microsoft, Google and Wit.ai provides necessary APIs to build cognitive chatbots. But how many small businesses can afford to build or buy these kind of services for ground up. Imagine you as a pizza shop owner and be able to use Botman service to easily plug-in an AI powered chatbot in your own website. The Botman team has built a chatbot platform that let you just do that in less than an hour. Once your setup a quick bot, it automatically gets deploy in the cloud. This is so cool that, for lack of better words, Should we say - chatbot democratized !

I would request my students to provide their LinkedIn contacts in the comments section here in the post so that they can be contacted for any questions and feedback. Of course, I will be delighted to answer if there are questions.