Making our way to the Grand Finale of Biggest Hackathon
Smart Indian Hackathon is world’s biggest Hackathon when it comes to innovation. Students across the nation participate giving technical solutions for problems prevailing across the world! Here’s a short story on How we made it to the Grand Finale of Smart India Hackathon in first year of college only!
Well it was day like any other, me and my friends travelling home for it was a long weekend. I was standing in the metro with earphones up and eyes keen on the seats for at-least one to get empty p.s.: I used to travel from Jahangirpuri to New Delhi metro stn. and then after go via train. I got a call from one of my friend telling me to check our official whatsapp group. I did the same and found a notice regarding Smart India Hackathon internals to be held on Monday. Well, honestly I was overjoyed for SIH internals to be held in our college and that too for 1st year students. Most of the colleges register for SIH and allow 3rd and 4th year students to take part. But, our college being operated from IIT-Delhi, Sonepat campus has only first year students. Our seniors stay and study at NIT Kurukshetra as it’s our mentor institute for now and that’s exactly what enabled our college to host SIH internals for 1st year students. So, it took me no time to decide that we are gonna participate in this, we means my regular friend circle. For those who don’t know there are three rounds in SIH. First round selects five to seven teams from a college on the basis of 2 presentations. Next is college uploading details of these teams to SIH portal and along with a proper presentation and finally we have the Grand Finale which is a destination game. So, as soon as I reached home all of us started thinking of ideas and looking over the problem statements. We were just going to participate for the sake of fun. There was no chance of us being selected for SIH finale and after all we are were 1st year students, we hardly knew how to develop a utility!
So, it was sunday now and we finally decided what we were going to present the next day. We unanimously agreed to make a Smart Attendace Recognition System. Well, in laymen terms you can understand it as a system having a camera installed in a classroom that send the attendance to the faculty in realtime. This was going to solve two purposes: Time consumption in physcial attendance and roll calls and proxy attendance issues. p.s: I myself used this beautiful proxy attendance thing alot of times just to skip some of the boring lectures. Well, it was 9:00 at night and I had a bus reservation for 11:00 pm. I quickly made a ppt and left to catch the bus. I reached college in the morning and went straightaway to classroom without having the breakfast. Me along with my team gave some final touches to the ppt. We were 2nd in the queue for presenting. First presentation completed and there were no questions from student’s side, only faculty asked few questions. Our turn came and I started describing how our utility is going to work. Soon after I finished we got flooded with questions even our pals didn’t spare us. Fortunately all of us were ready with an answer and future plans except the fact how will we be able to make the utility if by any chance we got selected! Chances of which were less than a percent. After answering all the questions and satisfying the jury finally we were asked to present for round-2 which was to be conducted after two days! But now came the challanging part, we had to develop a prototype for our utility within two days.
After the classes we assembled at Pulkit’s room and started working on the project! 2 hours of efforts and nothing happened. It was not a joke to develop a prototype within two days. We got frustrated and went back. Next day I and Pulkit were sitting in his room for his roommate was on a long vaccation! We were searching ways to develop a mass face recognition algorithm. Slowly things were coming on track and our utility was set to recognise and block eyes and face except both us had macbooks and our webcams didn’t responded. How can a face recog. algorithm be checked without a camera. We rushed to Vaibhav to use the same algorithm on his laptop. However, there were very less chances this could work. And you know what? Something happend and something that big happened that we needed to call the whole team to his room and after that this snap was taken!
Oh wait! I have a video as well, That’s what happiness looks like when your program executes without any bugs!
Finally our algortihm’s first step to detect multiple faces and eyes was complete. After working with open cv and haar cascade classifiers thoroughly we were finally a step away….oh wait! am not gonna go that technical in here. Me, Pulkit and Vaibhav then went to our lecture hall to see how the thing actually looks on the projector screen! p.s. wandering around the academic block and lecture halls at night is somewhat common for us. We tested the stuff, came back to our rooms and soon dozed off to sleep. Wait! here’s a snap from the classroom last night. p.s. Vaibhav testing the algorithm with full dedication!!
We assembled at the classroom next day and unfortunately no screen presentation took place, we were told to explain our project’s technology stack verbally. We along with three more teams got selected from our college and our details were soon uploaded on the website and we were provided with an authorization letter.
Task accomplished! thats all we wanted to do! Days went and we went on some trips and totally forgot about this! We were not a pinch worried to check the results as it was nearly impossible for first year guys like us to get selected for the grand finale p.s.: We thought so. We believed it was the end of this story but……..
Exactly after a month I was in the car with my father and I got a whatsapp message of a college friend ‘suna hai tera project select hogya, pata kr !’ I was like haha p.s.: That big joke!. I opened their website and saw something that threw my eyes wide open…
It didn’t took me a minute to call Pulkit and inform all the members about this. They were on top of the world. Soon, I informed my college about the same and all faculty were very happy. We then started working on our project and now its on the verge of completion along with a mobile application. It was really amazing how we made it to the Grand Finale being merely first year students. We were supposed to go Hyderabad for the same somewhere in may but, lockdown happened. The dates are rescheduled and we are ready to move as soon as Hyderabad calls us after the lockdown. Thats My Team:
Siddhant Tiwari | Pulkit Goyal | Vaibhav Bhaskar|Ansh Tyagi |Pranati Gupta
If you made it till here, am sure you liked it. Do share, there’s a detailed blog coming that will guide the college students, How to make a perfect presentation for any Hackathon.
For any queries mail me at: siddhantslight@gmail.com
Originally published at https://www.hyumane.com on June 1, 2020.
