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Laneone
Laneone

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Siddhi, 2015

Siddhi hackathon was conducted online during the month of October 2015, you had to register with an email ID on Hacker Earth and submit code to the hackathon during the day. It was conducted by Persistent Systems, there were 2 tracks, one for business oriented product lines, and another for environmentally oriented product lines.

I built a social media scraper tool that evaluated and profiled people based on their online interaction. It considered factors like the pages you interact with, likes you make in public, your comments on public pages, and other such factors. The idea was to make a tool for HR teams who could run the suite against potential employees, the tool would look through their publicly available online interaction, look for any red flags, and generate a scored report for the said user. This report can then be instrumental in hiring the candidate.

The main assumption behind this tool is that the confidentiality of the user will be maintained, only the algorithm or the tool would be able to look at posts made by the user, if it detects a red flag, only the acknowledgement of the red flag would be made in the report, the post that the user had originally made would not be shown/factored into the report, this way you can be sure that there will be no partiality or unfairness between any two trials with the tool.

The tool expected you to point the candidate's name, after which it requests Facebook/Twitter for his OAuth permissions, once the user grants these permissions, the tool scrapes everything that's available through their respective APIs and runs it through a classifier that takes care of flagging any activity.

The judges loved the idea, but it was an incomplete product, I could only get permissions from Facebook and Twitter and couldn't convincingly build the machine learning algorithm, still we were invited to Taj Vivanta, Bangalore for an offline session where the top 5 teams were selected. We each had 5 minutes to showcase our idea and talk about how our idea would leave an impact on businesses.

We didn't win anything at this hackathon, but the experience of meeting Mr Mritunjay Singh from Persistent Systems was really valuable to me.

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