TADHack-mini Orlando at Avaya ENGAGE: The Results

TADHack-mini Orlando at Avaya ENGAGE ran on 11-12th December. It’s a hybrid hackathon (in-person and remote) about using Avaya’s and its partners’ resources (Subspace, Telnyx, Toolwire, Red Hat, and Google) to solve problems that matter to you. You can see all the resources here.

This year’s theme, Succeeding in a Hybrid World, focuses on answering the following question: “How do we make the Hybrid World more authentic, more engaging… more real?”

Here are some of the photos from the hackthon, the videos (including prize giving and an update the latest on Avaya Spaces developments), and this weblog summarizes the event and the winners of the $15k prize money, plus lots of other goodies including great food (check-out the photos).

Despite the prolonged pandemic; the rise of a new variant resulting in new travel and gathering restrictions in some countries; and to my surprise holiday party season impacting teams 😉 We still had over 200 registrations, thank you to everyone who registered from around the world.

On to the winners:

  • First Place winning $5k
  • Hack Name: Meeting Minion
  • Team Name: ConvergeOne
  • Members: Kevin Kramer, Brent Bailey, and David Matthiesen.
  • Description: Use Avaya CPaaS to dial into a meeting bridge to cover for a participant that is not able to attend the meeting. Using Dialog Flow the minion will transcribe the meeting real time and listen for questions for their “Boss”. If a question is asked the system will SMS the Boss with the question and read back the reply to the meeting. Further if a participant needs that person to join the Meeting minion will bring them into the conversation.
  • Resources Used: Avaya OneCloud CPaaS, Avaya Spaces, Google Dialogflow
  • Second Place winning $4k
  • Hack Name: Smart rescue, powered by Avaya fly monitor
  • Team Name: Spaces Rescue Squad
  • Members: Alok Kulkarni, Tejas Bramhecha, and Kalyani Bhate
  • Description: To face any man-made or natural calamities like earthquake, flood, fire, COVID-19, etc. we want to showcase an idea of how Avaya products can play a vital role in rescuing and helping people in affected zones. Using this solution, we can make sure to reach out to everybody and help them to the best of our abilities. This solution uses spaces for the admin team to continuously monitor responses collated by telephony bot and using drone-spaces call we can remotely get help from specialists and do the damage assessment and get real-time information. Telnyx APIs can help us locate fake calls and Toolwire drill sessions can be used to aware people as to how to react in such situations.
  • Resources Used: Avaya OneCloud CPaaS, Avaya Spaces, Google Dialogflow, Telnyx, Spaces Learning / Toolwire
  • Third Place winning $3k
  • Hack Name: Metashop
  • Team: Genesis Barrios
  • Description: MetaShop is a 3D interactive Web Store build with Node.js, and Babylon.js, and Avaya APIs.
  • Resources Used: Avaya OneCloud Orchestration, Avaya Spaces
  • Forth Place winning $2k
  • Hack Name: Bender
  • Team Name: TeamZero
  • Members: Ebtesam Al Haque, Muntaser Syed, Javier Carrion, Derrick Wilson-Duncan, Chris Woodle.
  • Description: An AI powered robotic bartender
  • Resources Used: Avaya OneCloud CPaaS, Avaya OneCloud Orchestration, Google Dialogflow, Subspace, Red Hat
  • Fifth Place winning $1k
  • Hack Name: Telepaper
  • Members: Jared M Ashcraft and David Sikes
  • Description: Augments the distance learning and collaboration experience by allowing users to seamlessly write notes to each other in real time with tablet and stylus. Each user would have a tablet, and the notes would appear between tablets in real time. Since the tablets are separate devices, no screen sharing would be necessary, and the face-to-face aspect of communication would not be lost.
  • Resources Used: Avaya Spaces, Subspace, Red Hat

Other excellent hacks include:

  • Showcase from Red Hat. Messaging inclusivity with Quarkus, OpenShift and Kakfa. Red Hat, Geoff Allen and Daniel Schimpfoessl.
  • Description: Today we have many messaging apps at our disposal. This assortment creates many challenges in reaching users via their preferred method of communication. Our project utilizes a centralized message service backed by Apache Kafka to enable plug and play integration with a variety of messaging APIs such as Avaya Spaces, Avaya CPaaS for SMS, Web Clients, Slack and many more. This allows contacts to be invited from any platform to join the conversation – with the appropriate security measures and authorizations. Use cases could include access from areas without reliable internet, cross company collaboration, emergency response, ad-hoc workgroups and many more.
  • Resources Used: Avaya OneCloud CPaaS, Avaya Spaces, Red Hat
  • Game Fans by Ryan Harrigan. (Apologies for the WiFi glitches during his presentation)
  • What caught my attention:
    • Noticed platforms like FloSports
    • Enjoyed the concept of NBA Bubble’s Microsoft Teams 17ft wall
  • Concept:
    • Fans stream themselves – either at home or in their chair at the game
    • A moderator curates the fan streams for display on the Jumbotron
    • Isn’t the first time we’ve seen live video from a mobile device, but this idea could tap into a larger remote/live audience
  • Resources Used: Avaya Spaces

“Beddy Bot” by MRT Sleeper Cell (this team won at TADHack-mini Phoenix at Avaya ENGAGE 2020). By Darryl Jackman, Jambu Atchison, Ben Morrison, and Kyle Harrity. A healthcare oriented, Virtual/Actual blended agent solution, which self serves patients looking for information, and connects seamlessly to an agent, with the main point being that the actual agent not only gets the past conversation on their screen about the self serve portion of treatment, but most importantly the “bot” stays secretly online with the human agent to allow them access to the knowledge of the “bot” automatically. Used Avaya OneCloud CPaaS APIs.