Hyderabad: Fight Corona virtual IDEAthon today, tomorrow

Hyderabad: The Union HRD Ministry, All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) partnered with Forge and InnovatioCuris are to rope in young students, researchers, scientists, educators and startups to come up with innovative ideas in the country's efforts to fight Coronavirus.

The AICTE said on Thursday, that it is conducting a virtual two-day 'Fight Corona IDEAthon on March 27 and 28. As part of the fight against coronavirus, it said that the Covid-19 is spreading rapidly at an unprecedented scale across continents and has emerged as the single biggest risk the world has faced in modern times.

It is "only science and technology in the hands of capable scientists and innovators can come to our rescue in developing innovative but effective solutions as we prepare for future, which in the very short term looks increasingly uncertain." To make students, researchers and others to partner in the efforts against containing the coronavirus, it said that the MHRD Innovation cell and AICTE in partnership with Fore and InnovationCuris have launched the national level 2-Day "FightCorona IDEAthon.

The AICTE also added that thousands of innovators, researchers, scientists and educators from across India are joining hands like a true community for this 2-day online IDEAthon to generate and transform innovative ideas into viable solutions that can support the community in managing the uncertainties arising out of the pandemic.

The programme will be hosted completely virtual on the internet during which several ideas to fight the Covid-19 pandemic shall be evaluated, mentored, documented, and elected for the next stages of incubation support. The participants have to go through a rigorous process of idea validation, refinement, solution generation and evaluation, pitching and assessments, to find the most innovative and impactful ideas. The best will be recognised with cash prizes worth of one lakh rupees from the AICTE for students and educators separately.

The programme sponsor, "AWS will provide the winning team an award with USD 5000 as cloud credits to build the solution and take it to market and Rs 5 lakhs as prize money to the winning teams." it added. Further, the selected participants are going to be considered for an innovation grants up to Rs 40 lakh funding and incubation support.