On March 2nd and 3rd, the Government of India organised the Grand Finale of the Smart India Hackathon, a nation-wide hackathon for college students. The event was held in 48 centres all over the country and saw a participation of over 34,000 teams.
The Smart India Hackathon (SIH) is a product development and presentation competition, where teams are given a problem statement related to a real-life technological situation. Over a period of 36 hours, they must code and develop software that solves the problem statement. Each centre had its own problem statement, and a winner was chosen at each site. Out of 34,000 teams that participated in the overall event, four teams from the three BITS campuses were winners in their respective categories. Two of them were from the Pilani campus, and the English Press Club managed to get in touch with them for insights.
Team “edge-triggered” comprised of leader Rahul Bothra, Neetu Maria Joy, Rohit Rajhans, Manan Soni, Siddhant Jain, and Tanya Garg. Their task was to build a transformer management system, for which they developed a web application for the control center, a mobile application for onsite technicians, and a simulation software for the transformer. One of the issues that the team faced midway was having to change direction after feedback from judges made them realize that they had been tackling the problem incorrectly. ‘After 12 hours, the judges made us realize that we had been working in the wrong direction. The feedback helped us to course-correct,’ Bothra said. He recalled that the other teams had neglected to take the judges’ comments into consideration. This distinction, he said allowed them to edge out their competitors for the victory.
Team “CicadaCrackers” composed of leader Rohit K. Bhardwaj, Nayan Khanna, Keshav Sethi, Sparsh Jain, Chinmay Hebbar, and Anushka Jain, all of whom are second-years. Their problem statement was a tsunami alert mechanism, specifically based on the Andaman and Nicobar framework, keeping in mind the 2004 tsunami. The system made use of Machine Learning to make predictions about the calamity, such as how the magnitude and location of underwater earthquakes can impact the resulting tsunami. They developed an Android application for the residents on the ground and a web portal for the district administration to monitor and handle the situation in real time.
Both team leaders emphasized that for students looking to make their mark, taking the first step is very important. ‘You don’t need to know all the details, but you can learn when you’re trying to build it. One thing a lot of people don’t remember is to Google things. To actually make it work, you can start building it and make your way through each step by learning on the job,’ Bothra said. Bhardwaj revealed that he had been rejected with a very similar idea in a previous competition before trying for this one with a team. ‘There are a lot of good, easily available, and extremely helpful courses online and on DC that you can learn from.’ He recommended Udemy and Udacity, and even mentioned that courses on Android development are offered by Google. These courses are also available for free on DC. Both of them also stressed the importance of finding like-minded people and creating a diverse team.