The Mongolian international student team "Ants", two students from Tokyo Institute of Technology and two students from the University of Tokyo, is the best in Japan's largest student app development contest "JPHACKS 2 AWARDDAY". Received the Best Hack Award, which is the award for excellence.The contest was held on November 2th at the Takeda Bldg. Building of the University of Tokyo.
The team developed an app called "CookBot".It is a system that recognizes images from a single photo of ingredients in the refrigerator and introduces recipes that can be cooked with those ingredients.From my own experience, I realized that there are many people who are worried about the same thing when cooking, and have solved the following three problems.
1. It's easy to find a dish (recipe) that you can make with the ingredients left in the refrigerator.
2. The recipe is not a text, but an optimal cooking procedure (algorithm) is generated and visualized so that anyone can understand it.
3. It teaches the cooking procedure like a cook through two-way conversation.
The cooking procedure is shown in the form of a flow chart using arrows.Also, since it is a chatbot (a system that provides information in a conversational format) by Facebook Messenger, it is not necessary to install the application.
The contest is called a hackathon, and is an event in which software developers intensively collaborate for a certain period of time, such as developing programs and devising services, and compete for their skills and ideas.Hackathon is a coined word that combines "hack" and "marathon".
One of the developers, Dashdenberel Battunag, a master's student at Tokyo Institute of Technology, said, "The idea is simple, but the fact that it was completed in a short period of time may have led to this award."