Strange Team for KataHack

October 28, 2019

One day, I was contacted by a person who claimed to be an English Literature student and he knew me because I worked at IO Unpad. His name was Eres. He said that he wanted to gather teammates for joining an AI themed competition, which was KataHack by Kata.ai company. He contacted me via LINE in English. What a polite dude huh? We talked a lot about KataHack and decided to expand the team into 4 as the maximum number of people in a team. I asked Hilya, one of my friends in the Informatics department. We also asked Yasmin, one of IO Unpad interns too (to make Eres interested) and Yasmin's friend because we needed a student who excelled in business management like them who were from the business administration department. Unfortunately they rejected the offer. After that Hilya offered us her friend Yulia who was her temporary homemate to join our team. Yulia was also from the business administration department but in a different year with Yasmin and her friend.

Since Eres started the chat first, Hilya and Yulia followed to chat in English as well. In the beginning of the multichat, Eres asked if one of us could join the KataHack roadshow in Bandung on October 8. It would be a big help to understand KataHack competition. Hilya and Yulia couldn't make it so there were only Eres and me who went to the roadshow. I was actually disappointed because I had to use the DAMRI bus to get there. I wasn't really comfortable with a stranger but I tried to talk with Eres on the way. I asked him a lot about why he was interested in NLP and he gave me new knowledge about the beauty of languages.

The venue of the roadshow was in BLOCK71 Bandung. When we went out from the bus, we took a walk to get there. The roadshow wasn't as crowded as I thought. The roadshow had two speakers telling about Kata.ai as a company and how to use Kata Platform, the NLP technology that Kata.ai developed. The roadshow was so-so and I was disappointed because I didn't ask anything when they started the QnA time. The questions that I wanted to ask were thought after the event ended so I discussed them with Eres but unfortunately we didn't have any lead about my questions. The only one way to find out was to try Kata Platform by ourselves.

The next day all of the team members met up in SONO workspace. At that time we also named our team "Stranger Team" because we were strangers. That's actually a pun of Stranger Things that was being one of the stickers on Yulia's laptop though. I was relieved that we could get along easily. Eres and Yulia thought about the idea of making investment chat bot while Hilya and me created the presentation slides that were required as the registration stage. The investments chat bot we wanted to propose was named Indira. Indira was the abbreviation of Investing Directive Assistance. The presentation slides were done in one night because of our hard work. We didn't have to panic with the due date because we were ready to submit.

Several days later, there was an announcement that we made into the final stage yay! We met several times to discuss the requirements in SONO workspace again. I felt bad for Hilya because I didn't have time to learn about Kata Platform so I only helped on the presentation slides. We managed to submit the requirements in time except we didn't understand the purpose of Github repository. I tried my best to make a good README document but we didn't know how to put what we made in Kata Platform or any API related to Github. Before that, there's actually online coaching with Kata.ai staff but I didn't join it because I was fucked up with my offsite internship tasks and I barely slept because of that. The online coaching was actually a private QnA session like in the roadshow but we could ask about the use of Kata Platform for our idea.

We didn't pass the final stage. I guess that's because we didn't put anything besides the README document in the Github repository. But that's okay, we had a lot of fun doing this. I also could rest my brain for a while from offsite internship tasks to be more informatics again like the old time. Anyway here’s the Github repository of Indira chat bot and its preview video below.