In its 15th year, CampIO — Centric Consulting’s annual technical conference — demonstrated its commitment to innovation by pivoting from a one-day, in-person event to a multi-day virtual event.
Despite the format change, dozens of people turned out to experience the best in innovation.
“Innovation is the main way we get new technology into Centric,” said CampIO founder and organizer Eric Galluzzo. “Many of the technologies we use today, from ML to blockchain and clean architecture, were first introduced to Centric at CampIO.”
2024 was also the first year that Centric India participated in CampIO. After holding their own CampIO event in July, Centric India selected their top two favorites. Those teams presented during CampIO, and one of them — an AI-driven process for requesting and receiving blood donations — was voted the top presentation overall for CampIO 2024.
BloodBridge – Give Red, Save Lives
Called BloodBridge, Centric India’s innovation draws on the capabilities of UI Path, Outlook, What’s App, Gemini AI, SMS, and a Power BI dashboard to streamline and automate the blood donation process. The project team consisted of Utkarsh Johari, Ketan Tomar, and Rahul Kumar.
“If a Centric India employee has a family member who needs a blood donation, for example, they can simply send a request to [those in charge of a connected database] describing their needs,” said Johari. “BloodBridge can use sentiment analysis to help determine the urgency. It then uses blood type data in [the] database to find matches and email or text those [matches].”
For prospective donors, BloodBridge makes it easier for them to identify a donation center near them and to make an appointment. Both requesting and receiving employees can track the donation’s progress on a live dashboard.
“Future additions to BloodBridge will include integrating it with Google Maps and other health platforms, building a BloodBridge App, and incorporating predictive matching,” Johari said. “We are also talking to some NGOs (non-governmental organizations) about deploying the tool elsewhere.”
Using GenAI to Save the Universe
In second place was Robert Winton with “Using GenAI to Save the Universe.” Winton, a senior data and analytics consultant, is no stranger to taking home winner’s bragging rights from CampIO, as he also took home second place at CampIO in 2023.
This year, Winton’s project was a chatbot players can use in the space trading and combat simulation game Star Citizen. The game is complex, and “like in real life, it doesn’t give you all the answers,” Winton said. “If you’re in a position where you want to be good at this game, there’s a whole lot of knowledge you have to know,” he added.
His solution was SC Chat, a chatbot that serves as a guide to space. As Winton plays, the chatbot listens in the background and responds to voice questions in real time. “The big takeaway I got from doing this is, in a lot of cases, AI isn’t the solution. It’s going to be one part of a larger solution, and that’s exactly what happened in this particular case,” he said.
Using Low Code for Home Automation
In third place was Manager Nate Davis, a CampIO regular whose previous presentations have demonstrated his commitment to the Internet of Things (IoT). Davis described how he had built a smart home hub for his house that allows him to control his IoT life from a single touchscreen.
Davis used Microsoft’s Power Platform, Raspberry Pi, and open-source smart-mirror platform MagicMirror to build his solution, which is a centralized place for his 60-plus smart devices that power his home.
“If you’ve seen the ’80s or ’90s Smart Home movie, my wife and I joke that that’s our house,” he said.
More CampIO 2024 Innovations
Centric India was not the only team focused on employee health. Kyle Soumar, from the National Data and Analytics team, used Ultralytics vision AI tools to create his AI-Powered Fitness Buddy. Soumar’s use case was to provide real-team, visual feedback to tell exercisers when their squats are deep enough.
“People who played sports in high school may remember a coach who would let people slide on squats,” Soumar said. “The Fitness Budy is not that coach. It will let you know when you’ve completed your squat properly and when you haven’t, which is important for workout efficiency and safety.”
Soumar now hopes to expand his tool to other types of exercises.
Here are a few of the other presentations:
- Experience Design Consultant Chris Levine debuted CenSuite UI, a design system for helping mid-market clients deliver better digital experiences. CenSuite is designed to streamline and simplify modern front-end application development by integrating a design-first approach into development. “It allows people to stitch interfaces together rather than develop them from scratch, which increases speed-to-value and decreases liability and risk,” Levine said.
- Cincinnati Data and Analytics Architect Robert Urbanski drew on the knowledge of several neuroscientists and work-science experts for his presentation about how tech workers can create personalized systems to manage their work and personal lives better. He then discussed how note-taking software like Notion and Obsidian can help manage those systems.
- Sara Church, a content marketing strategist, presented “Secret Agent: Towards Building a Competitor Analysis ‘Spy’ with AI.” In her presentation, Church shared how she streamlined the manual slog of day-to-day tasks involved in SEO and topic research, XML site map pulls, competitor content analysis, internal content gap analysis, industry research, and other crucial components for developing a comprehensive content marketing plan using Claude 3 Opus, 3.5 Sonnet, and other models.
- Other topics ranged from “Svelte 5 – Runes – Magical Time-Saver or the Downfall of Svelte?,” to “Get a System!,” “Metadata Extractor Tool,” “Fulfilling the Promise of Lessons Learned,” “Apache Airflow – Workflow Management and Job Scheduling in the Cloud (and Everywhere Else),” and “Reinforcement Learning for Real-Time AI.”
Curiosity Sparks Innovation
From entirely new concepts to refinements to existing implementations, presenters at CampIO again sparked curiosity and innovation for all attendees. These types of projects pave the way for new solutions, enhanced product lines, and new approaches to customer service that help Centric deliver unmatched experiences to clients and foster a culture of continuous improvement within our company.