Mangaluru: HackVerse’20, a 24-hour national level hackathon, held during January 25-26, 2020, is an initiative by National Institute of Technology Karnataka, Surathkal, to serve ?as a platform to encourage enthusiastic young minds to brainstorm on solutions to challenging issues affecting society.
The unified motive of gathering like-minded hackers led to the creation of HackVerse and was organised as part of the year-long Diamond Jubilee Year Celebrations of NITK. The hackathon provided a platform for innovations, where developers tested and showcased their potential to the best of their abilities. ?We received around 2500 registrations from institutions like MNNIT Allahabad, NIT Surat, NIT Trichy, BITS Pilani, SRM, VIT, Amrita University, BIT Mesra and many more, making it one of the largest student-organized hackathons in India.
The organising team of HackVerse consisted of 35 students with Mishal Shah & Namrata Ladda, B.Tech final year students, as the Convenors and Dr Anand Kumar M & Dr Sowmya Kamath S (Dept. of Information Technology) and Dr Suprabha K. R. (School of Management) as the faculty advisors. Other student organizing members include Adarsh Malapaka, Akash L, Keerthana Polkampally, Mehnaz Yunus, Pavan Vachhani, Sai Sushil, Shreyas Seshadri, Shreyas Shankar, Soham Patil, Swathi Bhat, and Varsha Mavath. Prof. Karanam Umamaheshwar Rao (Director, NITK Surathkal), Prof. S. M. Murigendrappa (Chairman, Diamond Jubilee Core Committee), Prof. Jagannath Nayak (Dean – Student Welfare), and others have actively supported HackVerse since its inception.
HackVerse offered cash prizes of over Rs. 1.8 lakhs to the top three teams and other exciting goodies, platform credits, coding platform access & prizes worth Rs. 1.07 crore for participants. HackVerse received extensive sponsorship from a multitude of companies such as Wells Fargo, Fidelity, BSE IPF, Linode, DigitalOcean, JetBrains, Elastic, DevFolio, Monster and many more. Some notable names at HackVerse were R. Bharat Raizada (Senior Vice President, Wells Fargo & Company) and Dr Divakar Kamath (Director, Google Cloud India), who graced the occasion as Chief Guests and Jury members. Ashutosh Verma (Analyst Manager at Wells Fargo), Ananthapadmanabhan (IBM India), Madhsudan Rao (IBM India), Saurabh Gupta (Senior Developer Advocate at DigitalOcean), Sharad Srivastava (Senior Engineering Manager at Adobe Systems), Aravind Putrevu (Senior Developer Advocate at Elastic) and Denver Jude (Community Manager at Devfolio) were the other executives present at the event.
With around 200 talented candidates making the cut after an intense review process based on their technical profiles, the final showdown was the intense 24-hour hackathon event which turned out to be a resounding success with several innovative solutions to real-world problems from participants.
The first prize of Rs. 75,000 went to Kartik Kulkarni and Mahanthesh R for their project “?Extended reality haptic gloves: Feel VR with your own hands ? ”. The second prize consisting of a cash award of Rs. 60,000 was bagged by Saurabh Agarwala, Aakash Singh and Shashank Jaiswal of NITK Surathkal for their innovation “?The Safety Navigator: Find safe locations without Internet ? ”, while the third prize of Rs. 40,000 was won by Apoorva M K and Govind Jeevan of NITK Surathkal for “echoMark: A sound-based attendance management system? ”
