A battle of brain and byte, the Singapore-India Hackathon concludes with ideas for a smarter campus.
Twenty teams from universities across the two countries participated in the competition jointly organised by NTUitive Pte Ltd, the innovation and enterprise company of Nanyang Technological University (NTU), and All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE). A first of its kind, it was Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s idea. He had suggested it during his official State visit to Singapore in June this year.
Each team comprising of three members were tasked to build innovative tech solutions for a “Smart Campus”. Original ideas had to be fielded within 36 hours. Teams could explore how to navigate a campus efficiently outdoors and indoors, enhance learning using technology, manage an individual’s digital identity, and more.
Smart Ideas for a Smart Campus
The winning team from NTU Singapore proposed a community-based learning platform. Student users can collaborate on the platform and engage in mutual learning. Moreover, the platform offers professor-approved answers to solution sets for past year papers.
India’s winning team, IIT Kharagpur Team2, suggested an idea for campus navigation. Using Augmented Reality, the navigation app helps users find their way indoors. The app can also be integrated with Google Maps.
Other winning teams proposed ideas to improve parking on campus using a video analytic solution which tracks vehicles and geotagging, and effective learning.
The geotagging solution was by Team KillerKode from MIT College of Engineering, Pune. Coming in third place, their solution was a novel one since parking management was aided with “Sound QR” technologies as well.
Their Singaporean counterpart, Team Rakshacam from Singapore University of Technology and Design, used video analytic solution to track vehicles in carparks. The solution can potentially provide users information regarding where their vehicles are located. Team Rakshacam also bagged second runner up.
The top prize valued at SGD 10 000. Second and third prize-winners were awarded SGD 6000 and SGD 4000 respectively.
Hackathons the Way Forward
Presenting the awards at ceremony were PM Modi and Singapore’s Education Minister Mr Ong Ye Kung. NTU President Subra Suresh was also in attendance.
Professor Suresh said, “Hackathons and competitions are a great way to support innovation and creativity in our students. They enhance the innovation ecosystem by nurturing the creation of new products, processes and services. We are pleased to work with our Indian counterparts as we create this new powerful partnership to bring together highly talented students from both Singapore and India.”
The quality of submissions impressed the judging panel.
Dr Lim Jui, NTUitive Chief Executive Officer said, “This has exceeded my expectations in terms of the quality and level of proposals. Obviously they didn’t have a lot of time, as they only had 36 hours to work on it. They were given a head start with some of the problem statements, and it is evident that the winning teams actually worked on it the moment the problem statements were released. I think it’s also interesting for the Singapore students to have some kind of benchmark internationally as to where they stand, and it’s actually an eye-opener for them.”
The competition was held between 12th to 14th November 2018 at NTU. The High Commission of India in Singapore facilitated the Singapore-India Hackathon in collaboration with the Ministries of Education and Foreign Affairs of Singapore.