IIT Chennai to host mega science and tech hackathon

The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Chennai is set to host a non-stop 36-hour mega-science and technology contest, beginning September 28, in which joint teams of Indian and Singaporean students of engineering colleges will participate and provide innovative solutions.

The contest will be focused on five problem statements under three broad themes–Good health and well-being, quality education, affordable and clean energy.

The team providing the “most innovative” solution will get a prize of USD 10000. The second prize winner will get USD 8000, third USD 6000 and fourth USD 4000.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi will felicitate the winners of the Singapore-India Hackathon 2019 at a function to be held at IIT Chennai on September 30. Education Minister of Singapore ONG Ye Kong will attend the prize distribution ceremony.

Human Resource Development (HRD) minister Ramesh Pokhriyal Nishank will also be present on the occasion.

The Hackathon is being organised under the joint aegis of the HRD ministry's Innovation Cell, All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), the Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore and NTUitive Pte Ltd.

A total of 20 teams with 6 students each (three each from India and Singapore) will participate in the non-stop 36-hour contest. Each team will have two mentors, one each from India and Singapore.

“Singapore India Hackathon, an initiative of our Prime Minister, is the first of its kind joint international hackathon between India and any other country,” HRD ministry's higher education secretary R Subrahmanyam said at a press conference.

It seeks to promote engagement and collaboration of student community in India with the rest of the world and also to develop innovative solutions “for some of the “daunting problems faced by our societies,” he added.

One of the teams to be participating in the contest will show case its work on developing a method to measure attentiveness of students in a classroom using facial recognition, video processing, and image processing.

“The system will help to provide effective feedback to a teacher so that he or she can work on improving. There is another team working on 'sentiment analysis' of students and another on a framework to track and avoid reuse of medical waste using sensor-based smart bins," Subrahmanyam said.