Winning application focuses on helping track visitor numbers to shopping malls
Kuala Lumpur, 26 October 2021 – Oracle Malaysia and Universiti Teknologi MARA (UiTM) today announced Team Tech Shack as the winner of the UiTM-Oracle Data Hackathon 2021. The team was awarded the prize for its autonomous mall tracking agent, aimed at enabling shopping centers to remove the process of giving out physical number cards, yet be able to keep track of the number of customers inside the facility at any time, limiting contact and congestion to control the spread of COVID-19.
The event focused on using technology to find solutions to issues hindering Malaysia from achieving its smart city vision and to come up with alternative solutions. The theme of combating the spread of COVID-19, was prevalent across the 14 teams of five individuals, each from the Faculty of Computer and Mathematical Sciences, which participated in the virtual hackathon.
“Urbanization, globalization, climate change and demographic change are all putting pressure on people’s quality of life, safety and security. Many city authorities have been put in a challenging position to tackle problems related to these topics in addition to the challenges that have come with the COVID-19 pandemic. We’re encouraged to see the talent at UiTM, as we seek new ways to connect, get better insights to foster a better environment and develop smarter and safer cities in Malaysia,” said Fitri Abdullah, Country Managing Director, Oracle Malaysia.
Winning Entries
First Prize: Mall autonomous tracking agent (MATA) by Team Tech Shack
MATA helps count and track customers inside a mall at any given moment by leveraging already available footage from closed-circuit television (CCTV) and object recognition detection to monitor customers’ movements as they access and leave the facility. Captured CCTV footage is streamed to the MATA People-Counting deep learning algorithm running in Oracle Cloud virtual machine, generating a count of the number of people in the mall. The data is collated and stored in Oracle Autonomous Database, managed by a dashboard developed on Oracle Application Express (APEX).This automated system is aimed at replacing the current system of handing out and collecting physical number cards, reducing human contact and limiting congestion around mall entrance and exit points.
Second Prize: EZTrash by Team Amigos
EZTrash tackles sustainability by creating a system that empowers a bin to “smartly” reject trash that is thrown erroneously. To help citizens segregate what is recyclable, bins using the EZTrash system will only open for the items they are programmed to accept. Hosted on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), EZTrash leverages APEX to create and manage the database as well as Oracle Autonomous Database to record all transactions and Oracle Cloud virtual machine to “train” the deep learning object recognition algorithm to improve its image recognition capabilities.
Third Prize: Crowd detection in museums by Team iBlitz
With Malaysia considering reopening interstate travel and tourism, iBlitz developed an application that provides a real-time update on visitor counts in key tourist spots, such as museums. Hosted on OCI, the project utilises deep learning object detection and counting as well as a machine learning algorithm that forecasts expected visitor count based on past data. As crowd control remains a perennial concern, iBlitz’s application also notifies visitors of peak periods at popular tourist destinations to enable them to avoid those time periods.
