Say hello to, Smart India Hackathon!

Innovation and entrepreneurship are at the peak in India. In order to make development a comprehensive mass movement and innovate on all fronts, MHRD, AICTE, i4c and Persistent Systems have come together to organise Smart India Hackathon (SIH) 2019 - a unique Open Innovation Model for identifying new and disruptive technology innovations to solve the challenges faced in our country. It’s a non-stop product development competition, where problem statements are posed to technology students for innovative solutions. It can help to:

  • Harness creativity & expertise of students
  • Spark institute-level hackathons
  • Build funnel for ‘Startup India’ campaign
  • Crowdsource solutions for improving governance and quality of life
  • Provide opportunity to citizens to provide innovative solutions to India’s daunting problems

P.S. : I’ve just picked all that up from the site (LOL).

How did we start?

Drum rolls, cuz the story begins in 5..4..3..

Its one CRAAAZZZYY story and its best told dramatically.

It was December, 2018 and I was aware that applications for SIH, 2019 were open. But I honestly couldn’t care less because hackathons means having a team and I really didn’t have one since the boys in my batch would make one amongst themselves. But this time SIH made it compulsory to have a girl in every team. It was part of their scheme to increase diversity in tech. And because of this compulsion, suddenly the demand for girls to form teams sky-rocketted! I must admit I felt really special when I got invited to be a part of a team :D

Let’s meet the star cast, shall we?

It was a team of 6: 5 boys, 1 girl (so much for diversity :P). The skills in our team varied greatly and I think that was the reason why our work remained streamlined and well-thought throughout.

  • Designer: Vinit Mankar
  • Frontend: Gagan Ganapathy, Shreyansh Dwivedi, Pradeep Gangwar(Team Leader)
  • Backend: Pradeep Gangwar, Saicharan Reddy, Niharika Shrivastava
  • Data Scientists: Saicharan Reddy, Niharika Shrivastava

We also had an option to have a mentor but we decided against it since we wanted to figure it out ourselves.

We were team Bit N’ Bytes! (Do guess who’s the bit and who’re the bytes ;-D)

Teach me your winning tricks, sensei ;-;

Since it was my 1st major hackathon (it involved travelling to a different city and that was cool in itself), I had PLENTY of ideas about how to go about it. Everyone in my team was super excited and we decided to go step by step.

Step 1: Form a team Check.

Step 2: Submit Proposals The website listed various problem statements. They were divided as per difficulty levels:

  1. Complex - Prize of 1,00,000 INR
  2. Complicated - Prize of 75,000 INR
  3. Simple - Prize of 50,000 INR

They were further subdivided according to organizations which proposed these problems. We were expected to propose solutions for problems we felt were worth working on in the form of PPTs. They described our ideas of how to approach the problem, tech stack used, people involved/affected by our solution, etc. There was no limit as to how many problem solutions you wish to submit. We decided to atleast submit 10 proposals so that our chances of getting shortlisted increased.

Step 3: Get shortlisted We didn’t get shortlisted :( . Yes, that’s right. We were definitely bummed about this.

Step 4: Let magic happen A few weeks later, very close to the hackathon grand finale, our team leader got a mail saying we ARE selected for SIH, 2019 (Wait, what?!). What possibly happened is that once a team gets shortlisted, they’re supposed to send a confirmation (RSVP) back. But some team either backed out later or forgot to RSVP back and they selected one of the wait-listed teams(US!)

Step 5: Prepare The problem statement we got shortlisted in was:

To implement intelligent natural language search for all R&D data of Dr. Reddy’s Lab: We place all our R&D reports, findings, etc. in the form of PPT slides in a shared folder. Is there a way to automatically build knowledge from these and help us with insights for any given search term?

It was under the complicated section. We got ourselves matching team t-shirts. Our centre was in CMRCET, Hyderabad, which also happened to be the largest SIH centre with 42 teams, and we had to leave right after our midsems got over. The hackathon was for 36 hours.

Step 6: Hacking Begins! We reached Hyderabad on the 1st of March and tbh were very impressed by the hospitality we received from the staff. The hackathon started on 2nd, March. There were 4 sets of evaluations, all by different sets of judges. We decided to utilize our time in the most productive way by:

  1. Reading the problem statement thoroughly.
  2. Researching on active problems related to the statement. Who is affected by it and what are their ultimate needs?
  3. Cross questioning the organization mentors (I nicknamed them the Reddy uncles :P) to get an idea of the type of product they’re looking for.
  4. Drinking LOTS of coffee.
  5. Getting 3 hours of sleep each.
  6. Asking for suggestions after every evaluation round.
  7. Code, code, code!!

Our final proposed solution was:

  • Developed a prototype of a product for Intelligent Natural Langauge Search of R&D data by implementing NLP algorithms for answering in-general queries.
  • Tracking specific molecule/therapy based progress in a more sophisticated procedure.
  • Boosted our project by visualizing the therapy procedures and research progress over the years.
  • Enabled interactive data exploration for all the data.
  • Feature to dynamically update all the stats and results with increasing data by applying classification using Naive Bayes.

P.S.: They had a slot booked for recreational activities where they set up a DJ for everybody at 1 A.M. :3

Step 7: WAIT After a rigourous 36 hours and lots of south indian food, all that was left to do was…WAIT… for the results. I can’t make this anymore dramatic. I’d given the spoiler on the top only. YEAH WE WON!!!!!!

Step 8: CELEBRATE Believe me, I won’t be exaggerating if I said we screamt so hard when we won. It was the most satisfying feeling ever! It was an absolutely wonderful experience and I commend the SIH team and CMRCET staff for pulling off such a huge event with such perfection and smoothness! :D

Here’s the link to our entire project and here’s a picture of us sleep-deprived and happy :)