The dawn of the intelligence revolution

About 160 students of IIIT and Indian School of Business take part in the24-hour hackathon organised by Microsoft India and IIIT

March 02, 2015 12:00 am | Updated 05:37 am IST - HYDERABAD:

Students of IIIT and ISB at the Microsoft’s Azure Machine Learning hackathon on the IIT premises in the city on Sunday.– Photo: Nagara Gopal

Students of IIIT and ISB at the Microsoft’s Azure Machine Learning hackathon on the IIT premises in the city on Sunday.– Photo: Nagara Gopal

How quickly can thousands of credit card applications with voluminous data get processed? Not a week or ten days, but less than 24 hours. The young tech-brains showcased how to accomplish this through their ‘predictive models’ that filtered prospective profiles with accuracy. About 160 students of IIIT and ISB (Indian School of Business) participated in the first Azure Machine Learning (ML) 24-hour hackathon organised by Microsoft India and IIIT on Saturday and Sunday.

The event provided students with hands-on experience on Azure tools available to build solutions for Big Data Initiatives.

Sundar Srinivasan, Partner, Group Program Manager, Microsoft explained the importance of their platform Azure ML. “Through Machine Learning methods, lots of historical data can be used to predict trends and outcomes. The beauty is that data is exploding around us and going to cloud from everywhere. With so much data, the ML can consume data and bring in human-like intelligence based on predictive models.”

According to experts, there are huge employment opportunities too for professionals in this field as there is a shortage of 1.5 lakh data scientists in the world today.

“We have seen a lot of revolutions. The IT revolution was an assistant’s role for humans, but this is intelligence revolution, as the computer does the thinking for humans and performs tasks,” said Vasudeva Varma, Professor and Dean, IIIT. About 70 per cent of all corporates are either using the ML or will use it soon, according to Mr. Srinivasan. Some of the fields it can be effectively used include healthcare, civic issues, banking fraud detections, manufacturing and others.

“Microsoft has democratised the usage of Azure ML as anyone can work on it and build their models. It is integrated with cloud data. A user can even publish or share their model,” informed Mr. Srinivasan.

A total of 60 teams, each with two or three participants, took part in the event in which 32 teams were able to submit their models. Apart from the prizes, some of the members of the top four teams will get a chance to intern with Microsoft.

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