Telangana’s state-led women entrepreneurship incubator WE HUB recently joined hands with the Hyderabad City Police to reduce crimes in the city using innovative solutions created at hackathon. The 36-hour hackathon was conducted at the Kotla Vijay Bhaskar Reddy indoor stadium, Yousufguda, from 18th to 19th January.
The 99 participating teams were made up of four members each, from all over the state, and the country. These included students from engineering colleges in Hyderabad, along with startups, corporates, and other young innovators.
The goal of the hackathon was to create possible solutions to problems in fields like cybercrime, crimes against women and children, road-safety awareness, and combating fake news on social media. Contestants developed several applications and solutions, utilising latest technology like Artificial Intelligence, machine learning, and data analytics. In addition to this, each participant was also allowed to pitch their ideas to a jury of the Hyderabad City Police and the WE HUB team, along with academia and business mentors from VC firms, corporates, and innovation ecosystem enablers.
The overall champion of the hackathon was ProjectD, a prototype for reducing sound pollution, was awarded Rs 1,00,000, as a reward. Four other teams were also awarded Rs 20,000 each, and with the help of WE HUB, they will now work on developing their ideas further. Furthermore, a team of four students from MJCET is also leveraging the power of machine language to reduce vehicular pollution.
The three runners-up were Life of a Girl, a mobile app created by Hyderabad IIIT Students that helps prevent crimes towards women and children, Cyber Knights, a plugin developed by students from CVR College that curbs cybercrime, and Bietians, a hardware device designed by students that helps predict and prevent traffic accidents by cross-referencing accident-prone routes and offering quicker access for ambulances.
Deepthi Ravula, CEO of WE HUB, spoke about the association, saying, “WE HUB collaborated with the Hyderabad police to organise the hackathon so that students, startups and corporates can understand and conceptualise ideas to solve the problems identified. The winning teams and the top 30 teams selected as a part of the hackathon will be further mentored to accelerate from idea to product stage by the Hyderabad Police, WE HUB, along with knowledge partners from corporates, academia and business.”
Shikha Goel, IPS, added, “The objective of the event was to elicit coding solutions from the participants for problem statements like cyber-crimes, crimes against women and children, road safety and awareness and social media monitoring. The hackathon was open for college students, start-ups, the IT industry, researchers and officials from the police, defence and other government sectors. The winning coding solutions will be the prototypes on which we will design the products to improve police functions and solve policing challenges.”
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