Thirty young techies drawn from campuses across the State will be engaged in a 24-hour-long hackathon starting from Saturday morning as they test their technical prowess to find smart solutions to the city’s development challenges, which, if found competent, may be adopted by the Cochin Smart Mission in its endeavour to convert Kochi into a smart city.
The hackathon is being organised by the Centre for Innovation Technology Transfer and Industrial Collaborations, the technology business incubator of the Cochin University of Science and Technology (Cusat), as part of a two-day event named Cusat Innovate aimed at bringing together students, industry and academia on the same platform. Ten teams of three members each have been selected for the hackathon.
Considering the larger goal of giving students a stake in the development of the city, specific problem statements with relevance to the real-life challenges of the city have been identified with inputs from noted citizens and personalities from the field of government and academia.
“If the solutions developed by students are worth considering, they will be brought before the board of Cochin Smart Mission,” said an official associated with the smart city project.
Students will have to find solutions to problems in the fields of education and skill, food and agriculture, housing and transportation, health and hygiene, citizen empowerment and transparency, finance and personal security, energy, water and environment.
The solutions can be a web app or a website, mobile app or a hardware prototype developed during the offline event. They will be evaluated by an expert panel comprising members from academia and the government.
