Two-day Bootcamp and 36-hour Hackathon at VNRVJIET

Hyderabad: A two-day boot-camp and a 36-hour Hackathon on Internet of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence using Amazon Alexa technology was held at Vallurupalli Nageswara Rao Vignana Jyothi Institute of Engineering and Technology (VNRVJIET)by the Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering in technical collaboration with IdeaLabs as a part of the MoU signed between the Institute and IdeaLabs for Innovation and Entrepreneurship Development on Emerging Technologies.

More than 125 students of III-year B.Tech. (ECE) participated in the Boot-Camp and Hackathon and presented some novel ideas like using Amazon Alexa for analysing the mood of a person, or for ordering food, or to build a voice-based social media platform.

Some of the other impressive ideas included smart parking, stationery-vending machine, and smart trolleys in shopping malls.

Hardware implementation of these ideas was performed using Raspberry Pi as the single-board computer along with a range of sensors and Alexa devices working with the Amazon Web Services (AWS) for cloud computing and analytics.

The six most feasible ideas among those presented were selected by a jury panel of experts comprising of Investors, Product Leaders, and Startup Entrepreneurs, including Pankaj Diwan (Founder-IdeaLabs), Viiveck Verma (Co-founder-IIIT Seed Fund and Director-Hyderabad Angels), Praveen Upadhyay (Senior Corporate Leader from the IT industry), Kashyap Kompella (Founder-Edwisely), Udayan Bakshi (Entrepreneurship Trainer), and Srinivas (Technocrat).

Speaking on the occasion, Viiveck Verma expressed his joy at the good quality of problems identified by the students and their solution approach and congratulated IdeaLabs and the Institute for conducting such events.

Pankaj Diwan, Founder of IdeaLabs Futuretech Ventures, advised the students to continue the development and complete the prototypes created in Hackathon into full-fledged Products in the next few months.

Dr. C.D. Naidu, Principal, urged the students to develop these solutions into startup ideas and promised all the support from the institution and the Institute's Incubation Centre, the VJ Hub.

Dr. B. Chenna Kesava Rao, Director for Advancement and Dean-Administration, advised that students must engage in interdisciplinary learning and work towards problem-solving for positive societal impact by combining emerging technologies like Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Data Analytics with a social outlook.

The top three teams were given away cash prizes by IdeaLabs and offered support for incubation along with the Institute.