My Hack Exploits
I spent most of my college time either quizzing or drinking copious amounts of caffeine at Hackathons. Sometimes, I did both. We’ll get there. So this, unapologetically is a personal account of what four years of Hacks and minimal focus on college curriculum looks like.
NSIT Hackeam’18
I started to learn programming in school but during college is when I discovered Hackathons. They are basically 24-36 hours(sometime longer) sprint events where you just sit and code. Developing ideas from scratch, building a whole infrastructure around it, deploying it all the while getting valuable feedback from industry experts and sharks is what appealed to me from the very first day. This happened to be at Delhi’s NSIT where the TeamC and GeeksForGeeks organized HACKEAM. I partnered alongside full-time fellow batchmate and part-time advocate of radical centrism, Joyendra Roy Biswas. This was one of those hackathons that required more than just 24 hours of focus and required us to delve into some real issue and document it.
We discovered a shoddy implementation of blood donations and how people whose friends and relatives required blood/plasma had to contact acquaintances through texts and WhatsApp. So, we came up with BloodPool, an application to trigger requests within a certain radius of all prospective donors.
Now, you must remember that this was in 2018, when Facebook hadn’t yet implemented its own module for blood donation requests and made an application like ours redundant. As if. But to some avail, Team Anything(yep!) did make it to the top 8 of the contest and did eventually present a paper in the upcoming TeamC conference. All things considered, a fruitful experience.
Github:https://github.com/kartikmadan11/BloodPoolHack
TeamC Proceedings (Page 83): https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bhdcUA0EJBhDTbyMw2Y0mSVkXWlCf8W4/view?usp=sharing
Innerve IGDTUW’18, NIEC Technorax’18
These two hackathons came back to back and by then we had started to get the hang of it. Hackathons were becoming a bit of credible way to spend the weekends. We finished first and second at these two hackathons respectively and had now expanded the squad to 4 with Parth and Shubham now amongst the usual suspects.
We worked on some niche projects at these and they were both day hackathons that only required an end-to-end implementation to a problem. One of them was Coral Protect. An application to detect pollution and debris using machine learning to protect coral reefs. We used a huge dataset of thriving and alive corals juxtapose to diminishing and dead ones to train our model to distinguish with an adequate accuracy the corals that are or aren’t under immediate threat.
Github: https://github.com/shubham0008/CoralProtect
Barco Geekathon’19
I had been going to college gigs for a while now and it was time to turn corporate. Barco Electronics Systems hosted Geekathon in February 2019. This was a 24 hour hack at the company’s Noida headquarters and happened to be one of the most fun ones ever and not only because we won!
Well one thing to know about corporate hacks, they know how to keep you entertained. They had organized some brilliant events during the 24 hours to keep those creative juices flowing. And on top of that, the food was great!
We had to work on a hardware project and we came up with a Smart Glove solution called StrokeRehab which would help patients recovering from stroke in monitoring, generating reports and rehabilitating using sensors on the glove. The application along with the hardware could help the patient communicate with the doctor directly.
The project was dubbed the Infinity Gauntlet by peers due to the highly alluring look of the prototype and the Marvel movie’s recent release. The judges were impressed too and not just by the snide pop-culture reference but also because of the ingenuity.
We did continue to work on this project for a while after this hack and thought about the various modifications to make it a viable product and not just a project. Check the repo for more!
Github: https://github.com/joyendra/stroke-rehab
Incubate IND Hack’19
Incubate IND is popular for organizing proper largescale hacks and we were not going to give up an opportunity to try it for ourselves. In some hacks however, you aren’t given as free a rein to explore and develop an idea and this one fell into that category.
The 24 hour task involved using already existing smart street light data using data science and ML and also build solutions on top of it. We used real-time weather and location APIs for processing the incoming data and also published the records on the application using a Firebase Realtime Database. Also, while Joy and Parth were fast asleep at 3 in the morning(while working alternatively), I and Shubham along with a few others, who were also fighting their eyelids with caffeine, participated in a Kahoot! quiz with rewards on offer. Although, neither of us won managed to secure vouchers to amusement parks and salons that we’d never visit that particular morning, we did manage to get a podium the next day in the final round of the Hackathon.
Github: https://github.com/deadstone089/CCMS
Smart India Hackathon’ 19
Smart India Hackathon(SIH) is a hackathon organized by the MoE of India and was probably one of the most fructuous experiences I’ve ever had. This by the way, is not your typical hackathon. First, it is a week long but that only encompasses the part you actually spend building your solution. The actual process requires you to submit proposals months in advance. And second, because it is administered by the Government of India, the scale is massive. While we were sitting in KIET, Ghaziabad along with dozens of other teams, there were several nodal centers across the country doing the same, simultaneously.
The problem categories are provided and are divided into Simple, Complicated and Complex. That is generally decided based on how big an application would be required for the implementation of such a solution. Our problem involved finding a solution for curbing polluting effluents in the textile processing industry. It was a Complicated category problem.
The idea that the six of us proposed was WASD Pollute Check which would work as a green auditing system where WAS stands for Water, Air and Sound, the major polluting effluents — while Damage Control completes the abbreviation.
We made isolated units for each and monitored the discharge that the industry would produce through the various sensors on these units. The data generated was pushed on the cloud and we categorized a textile industry in four zones based on the metric generated. These zones determine the severity of the polluting effluents released in the atmosphere to make that product.
This was a modification on the CEPI score that the Pollution Board of India already implements for categorizing a class of industry rather than an individual.
The whole week was bliss and we had an amazing time. Sometimes, that involved playing Uno, other times it meant reiterating Phir Hera Pheri dialogues while streaming the Cricket World Cup 2019. The organizers even organized a Zumba class for the enthusiastic but not so rhythmic i.e., me. Having a great time at such events is such a bonus because that is eventually most of what you remember. After winning that competition, we made sure that we wrote some brilliant remarks on the back of trophies which involved wishing future SIH contestants well but also some of our favorite Babu Rao quotes.
I’m glad that I’m documenting the time I spent on hackathons at college but in the end, of all the brilliant ideas we came up with, the most amazing one was to start going to such events in the first place.
To sum it up, here’s what the bottom of the SIH trophy says right now and I couldn’t agree more.
