My Second Hackathon — Facebook

2 weeks after my first Hackathon, i was geared up to do another one with Facebook.

We had 2 days, which consisted of 12 hours on the first day and 6 hours on the last day. The goal of this Hackathon was :

• To build intelligent chatbots on the Messenger Platform by the use of a PyTorch back-end.
• ** The solution can cover any (useful) area of modern life. There are only two requirements: **
• Make the bot accessible through the Messenger Platform (in addition feel free to add other channels if you desire)
• Let PyTorch power a significant part of the bot’s intelligence.

My teams idea was to get more people to turn to Sustainable Fashion through the use of image detection and Chat Bots. For example, you are a environmentalist and want to do better at buying sustainable clothes… well this app idea would allow you to scan an item of clothing and you will be returned results similar to that item from sustainable fashion brands.In addition to this you would be able to interact with the Chat bot and ask questions about sustainable fashion, order and fulfil purchases.

It was a very challenging task as it required me to really try to understand how Pytorch works and how to use Detectron 2. I also learnt how to set up my environment, and how to use data sets.

In the end we used a very simple model that could detect weather an item of clothing was a top or a bottom. For example, Top, skirt, boots and sunglasses. It was very challenging to find pre-trained models that could detect specific clothing items, such as polo shirt or floral dress, and it would have taken maybe weeks to train such a model.

Real nerves kicked in when it was time to present our idea to the panel of Facebook judges. I was nominated to lead the presentation and it was a fantastic opportunity me to practice public speaking!

To my teammates I’m proud of what we were able to learn and build together in such a short amount of time and it was great to have met you, we were the dream Team (even if we didn’t win) :)