re:cognition

This weekend I was lucky enough to be working as one of the members of staff at the micorsoft and Moov2 cognition 're:cognition' event. re:cognition is an innovative and fun hack weekend open for all developers to come along and try out something new. The central theme is to work on Microsofts API for facial recognition and to build something fun or out of the box using this API. As well as this, it was just a fun environment for coders to meet up and hack away at projects and to form teams and friendships.

The microsoft offices were amazing and the interior design amazed me! Above is just one of the many hacking rooms we had available to anyone. There was free Wi-Fi, plug sockets, breakfast, lunch, dinner. As well as a few snacks from time to time! As the event was a 2 day event, hackers had the option to sleep at a hotel that they had booked or stay in the offices for free overnight.

To give the hackers some incentive, prizes were up for grabs from twitter competitions and building impressive projects using the cognitive API. One example that I got the pleasure of seeing and even using it myself included the mood light. The mood light used an existing API for the changing of colour of a lamp, the experiment made by Brandon Hawkes and his buddy merged the existing API with the cognitive API to make a lamp that would change colour depending on the mood detected by the facial recognition API. It's a really simple but cool concept!

There were a series of challenges on twitter. Anyone at the event could participate! Some of the prizes up for grabs included microsoft bands, BB-8 remote control toys and rasperry pi's! If you want to win a prize, network with other coders or just have a fun chilled out weekend then be sure to keep an eye out for the next event, and follow @recognitionhack for the latest updates!