City students’ projects impress Modi at Smart India Hackathon

Coimbatore: Two projects by the city students - health cards for waterbody embankments and chatbots to receive complaints directly from people’s houses - caught the attention of prime minister Narendra Modi on Saturday. They were among the 1,000 projects at the three-day software edition of Smart India Hackathon 2020, which was inaugurated in the day. Modi encouraged the teams to take their projects further.
Organized jointly by the Union ministry of human resource development and the All India Council for Technical Education, the hackathon is being held virtually at 40 nodal centres across the country, where 1,000 teams, each comprising six members, would code to find solutions for problems posed by state governments and central government departments.
Modi virtually interacted with the students at six nodal centres, including Sri Krishna College of Engineering and Technology in the district, from as many states on Saturday.
M Shwetha, a fourth year MSc Software Systems student of Sri Krishna Arts and Science College, presented her project on creating health cards for embankments of natural water bodies. “If there is a breach in embankment, there would be loss of lives and property. This could be prevented if we know when the next breach would occur. With the help of machine learning, we will study breach patterns and predict possible future breaches for preventive measures.”
Modi asked her team to prepare a prototype of the technology, which, if convincing, would be implemented.
M Kundan, a student from PSG College of Technology in the district, explained his team’s work on developing a chatbot to receive complaints from people. “This would eliminate the need for people to visit a police station physically, thus addressing the stigma and fear associated with the same. The chatbot would also spread awareness on filing complaints. It aims to reduce crime rates.”
Modi asked his team to develop the chatbot in all regional languages, so the same would be accessible to common people. He also asked them to apply artificial intelligence technology to the functions of police department.
Of the total 40 virtual nodal centres across the country, six are in the state, of which two - Sri Krishna College of Engineering and Technology, which woul host 27 teams, and Hindusthan College of Engineering and Technology, which would host 26 teams - are in the district. Each team would write codes to solve problems posed by the of Bihar government and the departments of financial services and science and technology.
The teams would be brought together on the virtual digital platform ‘Slack’. The hackathon would go on till Monday.