PM to address young innovators on April 1
NEW DELHI: Prime Minister Narendra Modi will address young innovators through a videoconference on April 1, the opening day of the Smart India Hackathon 2017.
“The video-conference (around 11pm) will motivate the students to think out-of-the-box and come up with solutions to everyday problems too. Students will be able to interact with the Prime Minister too,” said a senior HRD official.
About 10,000 engineering and management students from across the country will create innovative solutions in the form of mobile and computer applications to solve day-to-day problems faced by people.
A hackathon is a marathon computer programming challenge where programmers have to work continuously for 36 hours to create a software programme that would address a social or educational issue.
Drawn from 29 institutions, these students will address 598 serious problems digitally. These include geofencing of airports, online toll collection, smart/intelligent traffic management, cyber attacks, realtime monitoring of teachers attendance, smart drones to make airspace safer, title recognition system for marine animals, real-time monitoring of cyber attacks and title recognition system for marine animals among others.
The students, who have been shortlisted from 42,000 students from 2,183 engineering and management colleges and universities from across India, will work in 1,266 teams non-stop to build products based on their ideas across 26 locations in India during the grand finale of Smart India Hackathon on April 1-2.
As many as 29 ministries have put forward problem statements to the Union human resource development ministry.
Ministry of road transport and highways tops the tally with maximum 672 problem statements followed by the department of defence and production (496) and ministry of railways (488).
The HRD ministry, the event organiser, has produced 360 problem statements.