The two-day event, brought together developers, entrepreneurs and leaders from technology to explore, discuss and experiment with new ideas.
NASSCOM 10,000 Startups, in collaboration with IBM, hosted the India Data Hack – Machine Learning Hackathon on 30th and 31st May, in Bangalore. The two-day event, brought together developers, entrepreneurs and leaders from technology to explore, discuss and experiment with new ideas.
With an impressive gathering of over 100 participants and a notable set of speakers from both the industry and start-up world, the Machine Learning Hackathon – 2015 was centred on leveraging big data from Government sources to find solutions to real societal challenges. This not only gave the participants a chance to interact with experts from the field, an opportunity to use actual data, and compete with the best in the domain, but also a hands on experience of working with IBM’s Bluemix – one of the latest Big Data tools, on which they had to build their apps. Apart from gaining valuable knowledge and exposure, the participants also had a chance to win cash prizes up to one lakh.
Bharath Mohan, CEO, Sensara Inc, a TV Search startup, began the event with a discussion on the challenges of machine learning and spoke about various different aspects of building production products. In his speech, he touched upon topics such as mining nurturers in Computer Science Research, novelty detection in Google News and detecting ad breaks in television.
Then, with an overview of IBM’s Bluemix platform given by Apratim Ankur, Founder, Vuted, a platform for interactive videos, the hackthon started. This one-of-a-kind competition brought forth some interesting and innovative solutions on governance, healthcare, policy, administration and education.
Twelve hours of tireless work and two assessments later, the five winning teams of the hackathon were announced. Names of the winners and links to their projects are given below:
1. Team Fluid - Built a Smart Governance Advisory using WPI, GDP data sets and Bayesian Networks on IBM Bluemix - check out their app here
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2. Team Health Camp – Built a recommendation engine to prescribe Govt Policies that can reduce infant mortality rates.
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3. Team Hobbits – Built a recommendation engine to prescribe Govt Policies that can increase the enrolment of girls in schools and improve the Human development Index.
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4. Team Insight- Built a platform to provide insights into what makes any state successful and recommend effective policies to achieve the same level of success.
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5. Team IIITB – Built a tool for general public and the MP's to track their performance by taking in many parameters and characterize the MP's so the public stays informed.
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Although the hackathon brought forth many path breaking and innovative solutions, the main surprise of the event was the participation of Women – a rarity in tech hackathons. All most all winning teams had at least one woman participant and of the 60 participating teams, 10 were all women teams.
Karishma Singla, Solution Engineer – Data Science and Cognitive Computing, IBM, and part of the judge’s panel, feels that opportunities like this hackathon are a great way to interact with so many ardent and enthusiastic professionals eager to mark their presence in this ever-growing world of machine learning. She further added, that being a keen leaner in this area, she felt truly inspired by the ideation and exuberance of the participants and looks forward to more such events and collaborations.
"The hackathon saw a great participation from many talented and experienced developers, designers and programmers. There was a lot of creativity at the hackathon and people tried building solutions for the real world problems. All the judges were impressed with the kind of work participants did in 24 hours," Deepak Agrawal, AVP, The Hive, who was a part of the judging panel concluded.
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