Team KillerKode secures 3rd place

Pune: KillerKode, a team of three students from MIT College of Engineering in Pune, secured third place in a first of its kind India-Singapore Hackathon, which was proposed by PM Narendra Modi in June 2018. Team ‘KillerKode’ successfully prototyped an end-to-end innovative and low-cost product, leveraging the techniques of Geotagging, Sound QR, Computer Vision and Machine Learning for the problem statement ‘Parking Space Availability and Monitoring in University Campuses’.

The team of Kunal Khadilkar, Akanksha Kale and Rahul Barhate were felicitated by PM and Singapore Education Minister Ong Ye Kung and given a cash reward of USD 4,000 at the event recently.

To empower the young innovators to come up with digital solutions to some of the common problems faced by India and Singapore, Modi had proposed an idea of the first-ever collaborative hackathon, when he had visited Singapore in June 2018. 

Capitalising on this opportunity, the Singapore government decided to host the hackathon at Nanyang Technological University and the event was planned from November 12-14. 

To shortlist the teams to participate in Singapore-India hackathon, winning teams of Smart India Hackathon 2018 and teams from IITs and NITs were in the selection pool.
 
More than 70 teams underwent the rigorous selection process involving aptitude test and interview rounds. A total of 8 problem statements on Smart Campus were to be solved in 36 hours.

Team KillerKode was one among the 20 teams shortlisted, based on the selection process, by the Prime Ministers Office to represent the country at Singapore-India Hackathon 2018.

The team has planned to release their product to universities and organisations.

Winners of hackathon speak
Kunal Khadilkar said, “A very high number of universities across the world use the playground as a parking lot. Using sensors or cameras in such unstructured grounds is not feasible due to high cost and environmental hazards. Sometimes, it takes more than 30 minutes just to exit the parking area, if the vehicles are parked haphazardly. Currently, a lot of human effort is needed to make sure people park their car in the correct orientation, especially in large grounds. We focused on this problem and came up with the novel automated solution using Geotagging and Sound QR to convert unstructured parking ground into a structured parking zone.”

Rahul Barhate said, “We have used a novel technique of Sound QR. Using this technique, our software directly detects the arrival of cars in the parking zone without having to wait at any booth/ticket counter. The technology is free of cost, as it doesn’t require internet, calls or SMS for its use. We have integrated this functionality even for covered parking areas by developing software for detecting empty slots and number plates using CCTV footage and low-cost cameras.”

Akanksha Kale said, “To add incentives for using our app, we have introduced a reward system. If the user accesses our app daily, there is a high chance that he/she will get a nearer parking spot. At the same time, the app charges a penalty to those users who park their cars haphazardly. The app has been created in such a way that it can dynamically adjust to new parking spots. Thus, making it easier to deploy even on crowded roads across the world. Furthermore, we have also proposed a bidding system for users to book a car slot in advance, thus saving their time to find a proper parking area.”