IIT-Mandi girls win national hackathon

ibune News Service

Mandi, December 1

Nishita, Ruchika Sharma and Mehak Jain, all Btech students at the Department of Computer Science Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT)-Mandi, have won the first prize in the 4th National-Level Hackathon for Women in Computing.

It was conducted by the Association for Computing Machinery’s Council and was held at the Symbiosis Institute of Computer Science and Research, Pune.

A spokesperson of IIT-Mandi said the contest comprised three rounds. In the first round, more than 120 teams from all over the country participated. In this round, participants were asked to submit their ideas based on themes, ‘Environment Health Improvements’ or ‘Human Health’. Considering the future scenarios of the fast-growing need to use electric vehicles to reduce pollution, the team of IIT proposed to build electric vehicles charging assistant in the form of an android/web application. In all, 20 teams qualified this round.

“In round two, the 20 shortlisted teams were interviewed by a panel of five interviewers who examined the proposed idea and its effective applications. In this round, the team explained the features and utilities of the application developed by them. Only 10 teams were shortlisted for the third round,” he said.

The final round aimed at designing an innovative software solution to a problem statement within a period of 24 hours. The problem statement given to IIT-Mandi team was, ‘to analyse the before and after-effects of afforestation and deforestation’.

With the knowledge of data analysis, which was a part of their course at the IIT, the team was able to gather the required data and provided customised solutions to reduce deforestation in various locations and was declared the winner.