The APOGEE English Press sat down with Rishika Kalra, the APOGEE coordinator of the Association of Computing Machinery-Women (ACM-W), to learn more about the club’s plans for APOGEE 2024.

Rishika said that the ACM-W would be conducting three events for APOGEE this year — a workshop about deep learning in collaboration with NVIDIA, a space frontier innovation hackathon with the hackathons being their legacy event, and finally, their most exciting event yet, AI Karaoke Night in collaboration with the Coding Club.

Rishika stated that the instructors for the workshop would come from NVIDIA’s Deep Learning Institute, and it would be anywhere between six to eight hours, where the participants would get hands-on experience with deep learning, with a particular focus on robotics and working with Jetson. She also talked about the space frontier innovation hackathon, where the club would try to incorporate this year’s theme. The participants would get a problem statement, and the club would accept all sorts of projects with scope for web development and artificial intelligence. Finally, talking about the AI Karaoke Night, Rishika explained that the club has designed an interface where a participant scans a QR code and would have to answer a few questions for the AI-based model to determine their mood. Based on this mood analysis, the participants would be recommended a few songs that they could sing for karaoke. 

When asked about the challenges faced by the club, Rishika mentioned how it was initially difficult to get NVIDIA on board as they required a minimum number of registrations. They also had to ensure that the rooms they had booked for the workshop had charging slots as the workshop was quite long. They also faced a few minor hindrances with the AI Karaoke Night event. 

Rishika stated that she believed their club had made significant progress, going from zero events last year to three events on board for this APOGEE. She further talked about her experience as the coordinator of the ACM-W, describing it as exhausting. She acknowledged that this was required given the poor situation of their club last year, making the overall experience worth all the efforts they had to put in. She also acknowledged the efforts of all of her fellow members, thanking them for being invested in their projects and working along with her. 

When asked about her expectations from this year’s APOGEE, Rishika mentioned that she would like the club’s events to go smoothly. On inquiring about her message to the general BITSian reading this article, Rishika urged everyone to attend their events. She emphasized how they had never had a company as big as NVIDIA conduct a workshop on campus before and encouraged everyone to take full advantage of the perks of the workshop. Subsequently, she urged everyone to attend the AI Karaoke Night, which would be operational every night after the professional shows, for all the days of APOGEE.