PayPal Stories Archive

 

 

PayPal’s Research Labs team was named a winner at IoT World’s Smart City Hackathon earlier this month, which was hosted in Santa Clara, California. The 24-hour hackathon at IoT World – which is thought to be the world’s largest IoT event -- brought together several corporate sponsors including GE, Amazon, Intel and several leading IoT engineers and developers from some of the world’s most notable companies and accelerators. The event resulted in several IoT projects and leveraged technologies ranging from artificial intelligence (AI) to Internet Connected Smart Sensors that can measure things like temperature, light and motion.

 

Srikanth Nandiraju, a senior MTS Software Engineer at PayPal Research Labs and Akshay Krishnaiah, an Entrepreneur in Residence at PayPal’s Research Labs, brought home the win for PayPal.

 

Krishnaiah explained the hackathon challenge they chose:

“Over 200 million kids around the world are affected by allergic reaction that can be avoided, but are not as there is no friction free simple way to get air quality, allergen information or advice anytime, anywhere. We wanted to change that.We chose ‘Environment’ as the theme and built ‘Breathe’ a far field voice recognition app that collects air quality data from state of the art IoT platforms, meteorological data and more down-to-the street level data, crunches it and provides advice on a range of things including: the quality of air for children with allergies, recommendations for activities based on air quality, air quality levels both indoors and outdoors as well as details on the type of pollutants around,” Krishnaiah said, adding, “and this is for any location in the United States via Amazon Echo.”