MALAPPURAM: Mar Athanasius College of Engineering, Kothamangalam, has won the first prize in the Reboot Kerala Hackathon 2020, organised by the Kerala State Higher Education Department and the Additional Skill Acquisition Programme, here on Sunday. The event aimed at finding solutions to the issues in the education sector, using the technical skills of students of higher education institutions in the state.
The team led by Jose Dominic from the Athanasius College won Rs 50,000 cash prize, trophies and certificates for developing a web-based application, that uses advanced face-recognition tool using Radio Frequency Identification chip to mark the attendance.“With this technology, the attendance of students can be marked with the help of a camera. The technology can provide a period-wise attendance data and the system will also send messages to the parents of the students with attendance shortage,” said the students during the presentation.
The technology will save valuable time being used for taking attendance of the students, said the hackathon officials. St Thomas College, Thrissur, won the second prize by developing a virtual learning platform for the visually-impaired students to help them read the printed materials. The system can convert printed materials to audio and vice versa. The team led by Anson Francis received Rs 30,000 cash prize, trophies and certificates for their invention.
The third position in the hackathon was secured by Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Amritapuri, Kollam, for developing an automatic answer sheet evaluation system through a web application. The system uses semantic fingerprinting technique using machine learning and natural language processing to get a summarised form of the students’ answer and display an expected score. The team led by Jasna Suresh from the institute received Rs 20,000, trophies and certificates.
The hackathon was inaugurated by Vallikunnu MLA Abdul Hameed Master on Friday. The 36-hour hackathon, including five rounds of judgements, concluded on Saturday. From the 30 teams, the expert judging panels shortlisted 15 teams. They presented their solutions at the function on Sunday. Thirurangadi MLA Abdu Rabb distributed awards to the students. E T Muhammed Basheer, MP, Higher Education Minister K T Jaleel and Calicut University Vice-Chancellor V Anil Kumar were present at the inaugural ceremony of the hackathon.