IEEE is more eager than ever for APOGEE, which is just around the corner. Harshit Jodhani, the APOGEE coordinator for IEEE, took some time out of his hectic day to brief the APOGEE English Press about the team’s plans for the fest.

IEEE is divided into three ‘Special Interest Groups’, each specialising in a different domain such as machine learning, programming and electronics. According to Harshit, these are especially helpful to the junior batches to discover what their interests are. He continued by saying that they also work on minor projects and will soon reach their funding target to begin a larger one.

For APOGEE, the team is organising four events—Machine Learning (ML) “Codeathon”, IoT Contest, a Machine Learning themed treasure hunt and RoboLeague. ML Codeathon will be a completely online event wherein participants will be tasked with constructing an effective ML model in response to six questions, each with varying levels of difficulty. IoT Contest applicants will be required to present innovations in the many fields of electronics in a qualifying round one. Winners of round one will visit the campus and compete in building an IoT project in 6-24 hours for the final round. Professor Sandeep Joshi is likely to be the judge for the competition. The treasure hunt will make participants create machine learning models to obtain the next clue. Harshit also alluded to a ‘twist’ towards the end. RoboLeague will be conducted in conjunction with RoboCon. Players will be able to play soccer using a 30×30 cm robot, with one match lasting 6-7 minutes. Harshit mentioned that the team used to organise only ML based events or hackathons, but this time they stepped out of their comfort zone to cover presently trending topics.

Harshit explained that their workload near the midsems period—which included preparing a shortlist for the IoT Contest, designing posters, and publicising their events—caused some complications. Managing accommodations for people arriving on campus for IoT Contest and RoboLeague also posed a slight challenge. He remarked that being a coordinator has been a great learning experience for him. He added that although he was well prepared, some of the challenges he encountered proved to be quite difficult for him. On a closing note, he wanted more BITSians to participate in the events to make the fest better.