Emerging winners at HackaTrips
Nandana Mihindukulasooriya recently led a team and emerged victorious for developing the best app, at HackaTrips, a competition which was held at Fitur 2018 an International Tourism Fair in Spain. This week we were able to catch up with Nandana, who gave us a glimpse of the competition and his exciting journey so far.
Nandana with his team
After graduating from the University of Moratuwa (Sri Lanka) with a first class degree in Computer Science & Engineering, Nandana worked as a software engineer for two years. However his life was soon to change.
In 2009 he was offered a fully-paid prestigious scholarship by the European Union, to read for a double degree masters in Software Engineering. Under this scholarship, Nandana had to select two European universities as his host institutions, where he decided on Blekinge Tekniska Högskola, Sweden and thereafter Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain in 2010.
Currently Nandana is finishing his PhD in Artificial Intelligence at Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain. His research is focused on Semantic Web and how to represent knowledge in a way that machines can easily understand, whilst using such knowledge to take decisions, or to assist humans.
Our conversation moves on to HackTrips. Nandana explains the competition features several teams of programmers, designers, and tourism domain experts competing for 24 hours to build applications (apps).Their goal is to improve the tourist experience and to find the best innovative solutions to current challenges in the industry using emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning.
The apps have to be developed, based on the criteria provided. It has to be novel and built from scratch, during the competition. Furthermore it had to use APIs provided by the Hackathon sponsors.
It’s the organizers of HackTrips, who create the teams based on their profiles to make sure that it was multidisciplinary,while their expertise was compatible and complementary. Nandana’s team, included members from different nationalities, who had met for the first time at the competition.
“We had two from Spain, one Venezuelan, and one Sri Lankan.We were all fluent in Spanish, so there was no language barrier,” he tells us.
Now that the team was set, the biggest challenge, before them was the 24 hour stipulation. Their next hurdle was the lack of a tourism expert in the team. “The competition did have a few participants who were tourism experts and only a few groups were lucky enough to have them and a front-end developer,” Nandana recalls. But since all four members of the team were vivid travelers, they used that experience to rectify the situation. .
“Ricardo Crespo and I contributed as the back end developers, Pablo Cano Huero contributed as the front-end developer, and Mario Verdú Gambín as the designer. I also played the role of team leader,” Nandana explains. .
‘Grupa’, app was a result of their hard work. It essentially uses the historical data from bank transactions and creates profiles for users automatically by analyzing their expense patterns on leisure activities and using those profiles to suggest groups with similar interests
Further, based on aggregated transactions of each geographical location, they modeled the least expensive and less crowded places to visit and matched the tourist attractions in these places with the groups.
“For instance, places such as Madrid or Barcelona are full of tourists to the level that the life of residents in some areas of the city are negatively affected by tourism.
On the other hand, businesses in smaller towns and villages just outside these big cities get closed due to lack of visitors.”
Their plan was to form better groups with similar likes, interests and similar budgets. They also looked to achieve this without having to bother the users with a tedious questionnaire. Aside from this,the team also wanted to introduce local guides to the app, so they could show their towns, villages, cities and save tourists from having to pay overly expensive prices.
“All of this was done using the data provided by APIs from Minube, BBVA API Market, and Hotels Combined.”
Despite meeting for the first time at Fitur, Nandana and his team have come a long way. Whilst winning the award, was their first goal, Nandana and his team, also plan to make Grupa available to the public soon. “We are also analyzing what would be the most suitable business model for Grupa. All four of us are working full time on our day jobs, so this is something we are doing during our free time.”