SmartGallery

Inspiration

Looking for a great opportunity to experience an intense, enjoyable, and meaningful programming event hosted by professionals and intellectuals from major major corporations.

What it does

When run, SmartGallery prompts the user to log in or create an account. Immediately upon completion of account login/creation, our app parses a local directory of photos and uploads information of each photo including Geo location, the date/time at which it was taken, and most notably, the various objects that are extracted within each picture. All of this data is prepared and stored in a remote SQL database, where multiple tables are used to determine the relationship between the user's query and the parsed images. User interaction involves simply running the program, clicking the "start" button, where SmartGallery then records an audio sample of the user's request. His/her request would resemble something along the lines of "show me a picture of cars in California." Our app will then filter those results and present it in a user-friendly manner, where the user is then able to hover over each picture to identify the strength of correlation with the requested elements.

How we built it

The major breakdown includes IBM BlueMix's APIs; Speech-To-Text, Relationship Extraction, Visual Recognition, as well as IBM BlueMix's SQLServer. JxBrowser was the API used to develop the UI and it's interactive functionality. Decided we wanted to create a locally-run program, rather than run the program off IBM BlueMix's webpage.

Challenges I ran into

How to properly setup a BlueMix application; namely, how to correctly setup our environment to use IBM BlueMix's APIs due to our decision to develop a locally-run program. General lack of knowledge in the fields of HTTP and Javascript functionality. Then, of course, sleep deprivation and time constraints.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Being able to successfully integrate IBM BlueMix's technology within our own app and, in general, the fact that we were able to start a project from scratch with very little preparation to have it properly function in a span of ~21 hours. Using JxBrowser was also particularly rewarding as it provided immense insight on Javascript and programming a standalone application.

What we learned

An enormous amount of JavaScript, HTTP, HTML, and XML functionality. Gained a ton of knowledge/experience in the Java SDK in addition to the implementation of gitHub. We were able to discover the true power of cloud computing, open software, teamwork, and IBM's innovative technologies.