TEAM Makati Boyz composed of four tech whizzes represented the Philippines in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Hackathon’s Asean grand finale held in Jakarta, Indonesia on September 19 and 20, 2018, after defeating 17 teams during the 12-hour AWS Hackdays 2018 on July 19 in Manila.
The team is composed of Raphael Francis Quisumbing, Gonzalo Relova III, Marco Valmores, and Joseph Nathaniel Segovia.
Quisumbing, from Cebu, has been an AWS Community Hero since 2015, notably the only Filipino among AWS roster of heroes. Also the coleader of the AWS User Group Philippines, a role he has held since 2013, he regularly answers questions, gives advice and organizes events for the AWS community.
Relova is a Data Scientist, an expert in guiding strategy and designing systems. A scholar of the Department of Science and Technology, he took up his data science specialization at John Hopkins University. He graduated cum laude for his degree in BA Anthropology from the University of the Philippines Diliman in 2016.
Valmores is the founder of MacAppsLab and Chief Executive Officer for CrowdNet Project. His career in the information-technology industry spans several years, previously serving as the lead developer for several projects under Ntek Communications and senior software developer for Smart Telecommunication Inc. from 2006 to 2011.
Valmores earned his Bachelor of Science Major in Information Technology from De La Salle University in 2005 and his Masters in Business and Administration from Manila Business College in 2011.
Segovia is the President of Segovia Development Corp., a privately owned firm in the real-estate industry, and the vice president and business development officer of WL Segovia & Associates, which specializes in construction and interior design.
The solution developed by the Makati Boyz for the Philippine leg of the AWS Hackathon competition sought to leverage image and video recognition to improve business insights for customer retention.
AWS Hackdays is an annual education and hackathon event held across six countries in Southeast Asia, which saw competing teams build artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML)-based solutions around the themes of transportation; media and entertainment; e-commerce; and fintech.
The Philippine leg of the competition gathered a total of 18 teams comprising 61 participants, who used AWS services including Amazon SageMaker, Amazon Polly, Amazon Rekognition, and Amazon Lex, to build their solutions within 12 hours. These solutions were then evaluated by a judging panel based on their innovation, business impact, implementation and user experience.
Team Makati Boyz impressed the AWS judging panel with their intelligent customer-relations application. It aims to help the local e-commerce sector to improve their customer experience through inclusive in-store technology.
“We wanted to touch on certain aspects that not a lot of retailers are working on. We call it in-store analytics,” Segovia said. “Retailers ordinarily don’t know how many people are coming in their store. What they are sure of is how many people are buying and how much they are spending. That is all captured through their point-of-sale system. But you don’t really know if people coming in your store are interested or just looking. That actual event is an opportunity for the retailers.”
“Retailers can study how to optimize interest then actually convert it to more sales. The solution that we proposed is an AI-driven camera. The moment people come in your store, there is a foot-traffic count. Every time people move from one section of your store to another, we can generate heat maps. Essentially, we can determine which sections are being visited by people more,” he said. “With smart cameras in place, we can determine how many people are coming in 365 days a year. By giving the retailers these kinds of analytics, we can tell them if their store layout or flow is actually working well.”
For now, the group’s focus is preparing for the upcoming competition in Indonesia since it is expected to be more challenging than the Philippine leg.
“The level of competition in Jakarta is a bar higher because their science and engineering schools there is really top-notch,” Segovia said. The solution they built in under 12 hours using Amazon Artificial Intelligence and Amazon Machine Learning services impressed the judges the most.
“AWS seeks to educate developers across the region on the opportunities to build innovative solutions with AI and ML. By harnessing AWS technologies, especially Amazon SageMaker to build, train, and deploy ML models; Amazon Polly to build speech-enabled applications; and Amazon Lex to build chatbots, these solutions can help contribute to ongoing advancement of Southeast Asia in the region, and inspire the next generation of talented developers,” said Nick Walton, AWS managing director for Asean.
“When considering our project, we first had to identify the top issues and trends facing the e-commerce sector in the Philippines. We realized that while virtual stores are growing in popularity, in-store locations still provide valuable insights to customer experience. The idea banks on using the stores’ CCTV cameras that capture images and moods of walk-ins to enhance data on customer behavior through improved demographic and psychographic matching. With AWS technologies, such as the Amazon Rekognition, we were able to build our solution by adding image and video analysis to our application. We expect to develop it even further after this competition,” Quisumbing said.
At the AWS Hackdays 2018 grand finale in Jakarta, Indonesia, Team Makati Boyz competed with the winners from Singapore, Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand for the coveted grand prize—an all-expense paid trip to attend the world’s top cloud conference, AWS re:Invent 2018 in Las Vegas on November 26 to 30, 2018.
When asked what their strongest asset is, Quisumbing said, “We have a data scientist,” then added. “We hope the five other teams competing in Jakarta will not be as prepared as we are.”