Last year OpenNTF jointly hosted an ICS development contest with IBM with a difference: there had to be a team involved. The winners were Frank van der Linden and Frederic Dehedin. The application covered a variety of technologies, including Bluemix, Cloudant, and Watson. It also used the Jackson JSON Mapper Frank also submitted to OpenNTF and which has been covered on this blog before. As well as being a competition winner, the project is of particular interest because it goes beyond the technologies typical of many OpenNTF projects. So much so that a session covering the application has been accepted not only for IBM Connect but also IBM InterConnect, as Frank covers in the post he has kindly penned below.

Introduction The Job of a Human Resources Employee is hard work, especially when it comes to handle hundreds or thousands of Job Applications. Often, the Cover Letters are coming in unstructured formats.. Keeping these data in order and prioritize interesting job applications can be difficult. The details HR Assistant is an XPages application running on Bluemix and is leveraging IBM Watson services which are helping: Using the Tone Analyzer to get the emotions of the cover letter and job descriptions. Using Personality Insights to get more insights of the applicant Using Alchemy Language to get the keywords used in the text in jobs and job applications.   We have decided not to store the data the traditional way in a Notes database, but in IBM Cloudant datastore. The main reason to use Cloudant was to experience a new NoSQL data store. In the end it was a good decision, because the returned data of the IBM Watson service where pretty big, and with Cloudant we where not hitting any limitations. More details about the application, see the blog of Frederic and me http://elstarit.nl/2016/09/19/winner-hr-assistant/ http://www.fdehedin.ch/637/winning-the-ibm-collaboration-solutions-developer-competition-2016   The heavy lifting The application make use of 2 external OSGi plugins to do the heavy lifting of JSON Conversion and connection with Cloudant. The OSGi plugins, including the update sites can be found in the Bitbucket repositories. Cloudant connector - https://bitbucket.org/flinden68/cloudant-connector Jackson Mapper plugin - https://bitbucket.org/flinden68/jackson-json-mapper-plugin   Learn more At IBM Connect, Thursday 23rd February 8 AM in San Francisco and at IBM InterConnect, 22nd March 2 PM in LasVegas I will present a session about this application. In this session I will give more details about how we integrated the IBM Watson services and store it in IBM Cloudant and the lessons learned. Links The Application is available here: https://hrassistant.eu-gb.mybluemix.net/ And the source code is available on Github: https://github.com/flinden68/HR-Assistant

Posted by Paul Withers At 4:32 PM Location | Permalink | Comments (0)

Lotusphere/IBM Connect/IBM ConnectED have always been great events and it's absolutely natural to expect the same for this year's edition. A glance through the session list shows that the conference should meet that expectation.

But for me, as a developer, there was always something missing at these events: the hands on experience. Yes, there where labs (which I enjoy), but try to do something cool and crazy. Work together with other developer and do something special. There was no time - too many good sessions, too many good opportunities to talk with friends, customers, experts, and executives.

This year, IBM and OpenNTF have joined together to something special. We will hold a Hackathon on Monday, the day before IBM Connect. 10 Teams, each with 10 people, 10 hours (that was the vision). And each team solves an individual project, lead by Project Leader from the community. All teams should be staffed with people from the community, local students, and IBMers.

Our target is to break boundaries and integrate cognitive into all kinds of applications. It starts with giving Domino Domain Monitor the capability to send messages to Twitter (and maybe also direct to Watson Workspaces?); we will extend IBM Verse; we will use IBM Watson Work Services to analyze emails that are processed in a service desk; and we will customize IBM Connections Cloud.

This day will become the day where your hunger for new and exiting stuff is satisfied!

Do we have prizes for the winners and runners up? Yes, care of OpenNTF:

$1000 for the winner
$500 for the first runner up
$250 for the second runner up

Already registered for IBM Connect? Extend your stay and sign up for the Hackathon 2017.

Posted by Christian Guedemann At 2:48 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (0)