Duke AI Hackathon
Results:
2nd Place Winners:
- Afraa Noureen
- Bob Zhang
- Songqiao Xie
- Luopeiwen Yi“Bobcat: Your AI Companion That Sings Your Story!”
*also won Best Art, Media & Design
3rd Place Winners:
- Xueqing Wu
- Jeremy Tan
- Hoi Mei Tong
- Yabei Zen“Alex and Mia”
*also won Best Health & Wellness
From MIDS student Bob Zhang:
I’m beyond thrilled to share that our team emerged as 2nd Place Winners as well as the Winner of Best Art, Media and Design at the Duke University AI Hackathon, sponsored by inspiring organizations such as OpenAI, Microsoft, decorX, and 2ndF. It was an incredible weekend packed with innovation, creativity, and collaboration!
I’m incredibly grateful to have worked with such brilliant minds. Huge thanks to Afraa Noureen, Luopeiwen Yi, and @Charles for your dedication, laughter, and making this journey unforgettable. This win wouldn’t have been possible without you all. Here’s to more shared laughter and future successes together!
A special thank you to Noah Gift and Alfredo Deza for helping me dive deeper into data engineering and showing me what it means to work cohesively in a team. The experience underscored how powerful collaboration can be in bringing ambitious projects to life. And thank you Brinnae Bent, PhD for organizing this remarkable hackathon and allowing me skip weekly assignment.
Let’s take a glimpse at what we accomplished!
🎶 Bobcat — Your Singing AI Companion 🎶
Imagine a friend who’s always there for you, listens deeply, empathizes with your emotions, and responds by creating and singing personalized songs that resonate with your feelings. Meet “Bobcat”, an AI-powered companion that combines art, technology, and empathy to bring comfort and joy into everyday life. This is a fresh take on AI — not just as an assistant, but as a partner in creativity. With its charming design and emotionally aware responses, Bobcat is more than tech; it’s a friend.
Bobcat’s innovative build combines state-of-the-art AI and hardware for seamless, real-time interactions with the key features:
– Real-Time Facial Recognition: Powered by DeepFace, Bobcat assesses facial expressions to gauge mood.
– Voice Transcription and Sentiment Analysis: Using Speech Recognition and sentiment analysis, Bobcat listens and interprets spoken words to tailor its responses.
– Empathetic Chat Responses: Leveraging OpenAI 3.5 Turbo and Text-to-Speech (TTS-1-HD), Bobcat holds natural, comforting conversations.
– Song and Lyrics Generation: Through UDIO, Bobcat creates custom lyrics and melodies that reflect the user’s emotional state.
Built on a Raspberry Pi 4B, Bobcat integrates an Arducam IMX708 camera, microphone, Audio Core HAT WM8060, and a lithium battery module, allowing it to deliver high-quality, portable interactions that feel genuinely warm and human.
Looking ahead, we plan to expand Bobcat’s reach with cloud-based functionalities using Lex and Polly on Amazon Web Services (AWS) , making it scalable for apps like Slack and Discord, so users can share personalized songs and joyful moments across platforms.
Here is our project: https://lnkd.in/evKcTT3J