London Hack Day

So I've been here at Alexandra Palace in North London at the Hack Day organised by Yahoo! and BBC Backstage since 9:30 yesterday morning. I managed to get about 4 hours sleep but apart from that have been hacking away on various things, meeting new people (including Jacob Kaplan-Moss from Django) and meeting people I know already. By the way wii tennis on a conference projector is truly fantastic.

Every delegate has been asked to try to hack together a project which uses the BBC or Yahoo! APIs. Our team has produced is an image recognition engine called Fruitr which determines the type of fruit in a picture and recommends a recipe which uses the fruit. The comparison engine searches all images on Flickr which are tagged with fruitr and determines the picture on Flickr which best matches the picture the user uploaded. It then looks at the other tags associated with the image on Flickr to determine the type of fruit from the other tags. Once the fruit type has been determined the site fetches a recipe which uses the fruit with a JSON request to another server.

As well as the web interface the engine also has an email interface so you can email your picture to recipe@fruitr.com to receive a recipe via email. This means the site also works with photos taken on a mobile phoned and emailed on.

The great thing about the system is that the accuracy can be improved by other users uploading good quality fruit images to Flickr and tagging them with the fruitr tag.

Why not have a go at Fruitr.co.uk. If you need a test image I've uploaded a few here.

Here's what the site looks like:

Update 2008-11-15: The Fruitr site is no longer available.

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