NealHack 2.0 – A Hackathon where ideas turn into reality

NealHack 2.0 – A Hackathon where ideas turn into reality

Results announcement (updated on 9/15)

hackathon winners

Heartiest congratulations to all winners, runners-ups, and participants for making his event remarkable.

Winner: Team Auto-Mate

1st Runner up: Team Iconic Mensa

2nd Runner up: Team Code Genesis and The WallFire

Special recognition award (Humanitarian cause): Team Neal Titans

Event announcement

We’re excited to announce the second annual Neal Analytics Hackathon, aka “NealHack”, hosted by our India team from September 9th to 11th, 2022.    

This hackathon will allow our developers and change-makers to turn innovative ideas into reality.  

Due to the COVID-19 safety restrictions and remote working, this year’s hackathon will be hosted virtually. The 13 participating teams will bring in professional creativity and self-expression by leveraging the most innovative and modern technological solutions in front of the management. They will have 36 hours to turn their ideas into working prototypes.  

The participating teams will complete the hackathon by showcasing their work to the evaluation committee on Sunday, September 11th morning and early afternoon (Pune, India time). 

Without further ado, let us introduce you to our dream teams! 

 

Team Auto-Mate: SQL to PySpark converter 

We are creating a tool that can convert a range of basic to advanced SQL queries that we use in our day-to-day development to PySpark.  

This tool serves multiple purposes like assisting in educating people using syntax with regular use, saves time, and helps transition to Databricks environment.  

 

Team Bit by Bit: Scaling recommendation for Synapse Datawarehouse   

In Synapse Datawarehouse, there is no provision to dynamically maintain the DWU’s as per usage for the users. This project is to provide better user experience to the Synapse users with respect to usage of data warehouse units and provide recommendation to scale up/down.   

 

Team Code Genesis: Unbalance detection in industrial machinery  

Undetected unbalances in the rotor shafts used in machinery may cause degradation in the production quality. It may also cause the machine to fail in the long term.  

To solve this problem, we are proposing an analysis of the machine’s vibration data using a machine learning model, generating alerts for observed unbalance for preventive maintenance and real-time visualization of the vibrational data. This use case extends to any manufacturing domain like automotive, aviation, rotor balancing, etc.  

 

Team Ctrl Alt Elite: Power BI assistant  

People working on Power BI projects are generally managers or executives who want to be able to see the latest reports/dashboards frequently. Ideally, a manager does not need the entire report, but the ability to see data for a specific scenario. The “Power BI assistant” will help managers by letting them filter data according to their use cases and be able to get snapshots of reports/dashboard on email with frequency that best suits their needs, be it every week, hour, month, etc. 

 

Team Data Rangers: Visitor management at gates using live video analytics

Security personnel at the gates for visitor authorization and existing manual/RFID systems are generally inefficient and not modular for visitor registration at building entrances. 

To solve this problem, we will leverage AI pipelines to detect vehicle details already registered on the system to allow automatic entry at the gates. An edge device will be used to deploy live video analytics and control the gate’s boom barrier to enhance gate management and extract transaction data for cross selling (future scope).  

 

Team Iconic Mensa: Interactive dashboard for manufacturing system  

There are a few common internal challenges faced by the manufacturing industry which can be solved with the advancement in technology:  

  • Demand forecasting  
  • Inventory control  
  • Efficiency of manufacturing plant  

We are developing an interactive dashboard that can help the manufacturing plant to improve operational efficiency, provide multi-warehouse support, forecast sales, and ensure on-time deliveries. 

 

Team Neal Titans: Live navigation and text to speech for visually impaired  

Visual impairment can often restrict a person’s movement in their day-to-day life. Activities like walking down the street or getting groceries can be challenging and may require another person’s support.  

Our application/device will help to solve this problem and help provide more autonomy to people with visual impairments. Our project will help guide users smartly on the street, navigating with live streaming through a camera. A text-to-speech/audio feature will also help with grocery shopping when identifying items. 

 

Team Precision: Azure cost management and analytics  

The out-of-the-box “cost analysis tool” available from Azure has limited capability. It only allows us to look at cost from the service level. We have faced multiple challenges when we need to investigate what is causing the costs to rise in a specific service.    

The solution we’re developing will suggest improvements to reduce Azure costs and will help the IT team administrators effectively track the cost of their subscriptions.  

 

Team SayOne Protons: Financial analytics for revenue growth   

We are building a solution that helps identify the top factors for revenue growth from an e-commerce platform. Here, we will create an ML model in order to identify the growth factors of online retail platforms.   

This project will help the retailers to identify the growth factors from the vast amount of data they are generating on their online platforms.  

 

Team Tech Panthers: Customer segmentation 

Customer segmentation using the RFM technique helps us to classify customers into different groups using quantities. With the abundance of customer insights data available through social media and e-commerce websites, we divide it into different customer segments based on sales, location, and reviews.  

We will create a dashboard with previous customer insights data providing insights into future marketing strategies and a means to compare previous KPIs with the to-date KPIs. This comparison helps in better planning and strategizing sales. 

 

Team The HackPackers: Azure DevOps cost optimizer  

Our goal is to efficiently manage and save costs for DevOps with minimal human intervention. There are various kinds of user licenses and individual services like Azure pipelines and Azure artifacts available for DevOps service. Billing and pricing for each procured plan are also different for the users in any organization. Having different plans for different users with different usage, administrators need to spend more manual efforts on managing various tasks and for a large organization (huge DevOps user base), this could be a daunting task to do manually.   

With our approach, above all challenges can be minimized where DevOps services (plans, pipelines, test plans, artifacts) can be tracked for users on web app with data insights and predictive tracking features available (using ML algorithm) for efficiently managing and saving cost in multiple DevOps projects. 

 

Team The Wallfire: Automatic data validation  

The “automatic data validation” tool will be the game changer in data engineering and data science field. This tool will help the solution development team tremendously to reduce the manual efforts required to perform the data quality checks on flat files which are stored in the ADLS or anywhere.   

This tool will help automate some of the processes of ETL and will make sure data will be clean in some form.  

 

Team Trojan Wave: Data quality check   

Currently, whenever we are doing an ETL Process, we must perform a test to validate whether our ETL process is successful or not. Generally, this process is manual which includes running queries in source and destination database and comparing them.   

Our proposal is to build an automated tool where users can configure their queries once and they can get the compared result in a Power BI dashboard. Our tool will be flexible to adapt to new databases with minimal development.   

With this, we are hoping to reduce the QA testing time significantly. 

 

Stay tuned for news on NealHack 2.0 

Best of luck to all our teams!   

Stay tuned on Neal Analytics LinkedIn page and follow #NealHack to hear more about each team. The winners will be announced on Sept 12th post-event.