Data Rocks at Smukfest 2019

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For the second consecutive year, IBM and Smukfest have partnered to help build a better and optimized festival experience for the more than 60,000 guests at the Danish music festival, which this year is from August 7 to 11, 2019.

Once again our team of IBM volunteers will together with Smukfest volunteers be working around the clock to capture and analyse data that will be used to solve seven different use cases which have been predetermined using our design thinking method and agile approach. These analyses will give Smukfest unique insights into the large amounts of data gathered during the festival in real-time. The insights will help reveal the attendees food and beverage buying behavior, improve crowd safety, indicate audience preferences and answer frequently asked questions ultimately creating a better festival experience. All done so the individuals are fully anonymous as data is cleansed for any personal identity.

Based on available data, harnessing streaming analytics on IBM Cloud to prepare data we use IBM Compose and Cloud Object storage for storing data, Watson Studio for analyzing the data and the IBM Message Hub for powering the user’s apps. IBM and Smukfest will work on the following seven use cases at this year’s Smukfest.

Data Analysis

Data will be analysed based on audience surveys to uncover the hidden value found in the text boxes that cannot be quantified. Furthermore, all data sources will be analyzed to help security teams prepare their manoeuvres, improve audience experiences and find hidden information in the data. In addition, a catalog of data will be prepared that visualizes all the collected data in order to uncover correlations.

Sales Dashboard

A sales dashboard is built, so bars in real-time can keep up with their sales and compare the sales with last year’s data. In addition, analyses of estimated sales will be made and visualized based on data from various sources, including the weather, the music program, sales history and number of festival guests in the festival site. This will help optimize stock supply, inventory management as well as increase sales and decrease queue time – in real-time and also for next year’s festival.

My Festival Experience

We have created an app which a selection of guests will test at Smukfest 2019. In the app, they will be asked a several amount of questions that will be used to deduce their festival archetype (such as the Hippie, the Hipster, the Metalhead, etc.). Based on this, a personal festival program will automatically be determined, and the app will track how well the program corresponds with the user’s actual festival attendance. At the end of the festival, the user will be able to download “a package” with the combined festival experience (pictures, fun facts, which archetype the user actually was, etc.). Based on this knowledge, Smukfest will be able to adapt and optimize the festival experience in the future.

Waltherbot and Grønspættebot

Walther bot is a chat bot built on Watson Assistant to provide festival guests with practical information and answers to frequently asked questions such as “where is the nearest toilet?” and “who is performing at Bøgescenerne today?”.

Grønspættebot is a similar chat bot, however, the Grønspættebot is developed for the Smukfest employees and volunteers as a virtual assistant. It is based on data from the Grønspætte app, Smukfest’s website and internal community site and makes it possible to find answers to frequently asked questions such as “where do I find the nearest dumpster?”, “how do I swap shifts with my colleagues?” etc.

Live Crowd Data

By geo-tracking the festival guests and mapping it in a timeline throughout the day, our team is able to detect movement patterns around the festival area covering more than 600,000 square meters. Using data from various sources that detects things like dust, sound, GSM signals, gate data, etc., we will calculate how many people are gathered around the festival area and visualize it in a heat map. Combining this heat map with geo-tracking of the medical and security teams, Smukfest will be able to reduce overcrowding at stages and other potential safety hazards as well as instantly allocate medical teams to the right place in case of an emergency.

Waltherbot robot at Smukfest

Game on Walther is a cooperation between IBM, DIS (Dansk Ingeniørservice) and Smukfest. The idea was to build something fun for the festival guests using the competences from all three companies. Together we have built a game were the players will use other festival guests as bricks in the game. Based on the data available, the players will be given different challenges that need to be solved in a certain time. Using the chip in their wristbands the players will face challenges such as, ‘find a person that has not bought a beer yet’ or ‘find a person that has spent more than 500 DKK’. When the players scan the chip of a festival guest, the game will tell them if the challenge is solved or not. There will be daily winners and awards for the top performers.

Common to all the seven use cases are that IBM Cloud is the underlying platform, which provides all the necessary tools needed. As an example, Kubernetes is used to host applications where each application is delivered as a micro-service, and there is a fully automated pipeline for the developers. This means after they have written their code, it is possible to move the code to production without requiring manual steps. Furthermore, all data collected, stored and processed at Smukfest will be cleansed for digital traces of personal information to comply with the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

With all these exciting use cases we look forward to making data rock at Smukfest 2019 and to continuously optimize the Smukfest festival experience.

To learn more about the partnership and solutions please reach out to me at FRANKO@dk.ibm.com. Hope to see you at Smukfest 2019!