Spotle COVID Hackathon: students from top colleges to present solutions

Kolkata: The COVID pandemic has spiraled into a global crisis with severe impact on human lives and livelihoods. A large number of people, particularly health-workers, are working relentlessly to fight the pandemic. The technology industry has stepped in to power this resistance too. From enabling reliable and fast testing to developing vaccines and disseminating accurate warnings to citizen, technology is playing a key role in solving the COVID crisis.

Spotle launched the COVID Hackathon for students across India to involve them in building solutions and generate out-of-the-box ideas for the COVID pandemic. The hackathon required students to work on either of the two problems: 1) Build powerful visualisation tools to trace the outbreak and recovery patterns, across geographies, using data from public sources. 2) Develop the prototype for a COVID rapid testing mechanism using X-ray images.

Over 100 students from India’s leading colleges including IIT Guwahati, Calcutta University, NIT Rourkela, Delhi University, IIM Indore, IIM Lucknow, KIIT Bhuvaneshwar, Manipal University participated in the hackathon. The students were mentored by Mousum Dutta, Co-founder and Chief Data Scientist, Spotle.ai; Kaniska Mandal, AI Leader, Walmart, USA and Jitesh Nagaria, Founder and CEO, doLoopTech. DoLoopTech, a healthtech AI company is also sponsoring the hackathon grand prize.

After weeks of hard work, the hackathon winners will be decided in a grand finale with an elite global jury including Priya Sengupta, CEO, Lifevitae, Singapore; Dr Seuli Mukhopadhyay, Department of Computer Science, IIT Bombay; Kaniska Mandal, AI Leader, Walmart, USA, and Jitesh Nagaria, CEO, doLoopTech and primary sponsor for the hackathon.

The finale will also be attended by Achyuta Ghosh, Head of Research, Nasscom. Bloggers Alliance, which is the media and blogging partner for the finale, will be represented by media guests including Narvijay Yadav, Chandrakant Patil and Devendra Vishal Jaiswal, Leadership Team at Bloggers Alliance.

The 7 finalists will be competing for a grand prize sponsored by DoLoopTech and global recognition through Spotle’s corporate and academic partners around the world. The students are also being matched to healthtech companies to implement most viable of the student solutions at an industrial scale to fight the global pandemic.

Rimjhim Ray, Co-founder, Spotle AI said, “Spotle.ai is India’s first millennial focused career platform using AI to personalize career paths for millennials and Gen Z. Founded by a team from IIT, Jadavpur and Imperial College, London, Spotle reaches 5 Million millennials and over 20,000 employers."

The attendance of the Spotle Covid Hackathon finale is by invite only. The student solutions will be shared in the public domain to facilitate translating some of their work to industry grade solutions for one of the largest pandemics to affect humankind in recent times.