Media Release
Mangaluru, Jan 30: HackVerse’20, a 24-hour national level hackathon, held on January 25 and 26 is an initiative by the National Institute of Technology Karnataka (NITK), Surathkal, to serve as a platform to encourage enthusiastic young minds to brainstorm on solutions challenging issues affecting society.
The unified motive of gathering like-minded hackers led to the creation of HackVerse, and was organized as part of the year-long diamond jubilee year celebrations of NITK. The hackathon provides a platform for innovations, where developers can test and showcase their potential to the best of their abilities. Around 2500 registrations from institutions like MNNIT Allahabad, NIT Surat, NIT Trichy, BITS Pilani, SRM, VIT, Amrita University, BIT Mesra and many more were received making it one of the largest student-organized hackathons in India.
The organizing team of HackVerse consisted of 35 students with Mishal Shah and Namrata Ladda, BTech final year students, as the convenors and Dr Anand Kumar M and Dr Sowmya Kamath S (department of Information Technology) and Dr Suprabha K R (School of Management) as the faculty advisors. Other student organizing members included Adarsh Malapaka, Akash L, Keerthana Polkampally, Mehnaz Yunus, Pavan Vachhani, Sai Sushil, Shreyas Seshadri, Shreyas Shankar, Soham Patil, Swathi Bhat and Varsha Mavath.
Prof Karanam Umamaheshwar Rao (director, NITK Surathkal), Prof S M Murigendrappa (chairman, diamond jubilee core committee), Prof Jagannath Nayak (dean - Student welfare) and others have actively supported HackVerse since its inception.
HackVerse offered cash prizes of over Rs 1.8 lac to the top three teams and other exciting goodies, platform credits, coding platform access and prizes worth Rs 1.07 crore to the participants.
HackVerse received extensive sponsorship from a multitude of companies such as Wells Fargo, Fidelity, BSE IPF, Linode, DigitalOcean, JetBrains, Elastic, DevFolio, Monster and many more. Some notable names at HackVerse were R Bharat Raizada (senior vice-president, Wells Fargo & Company) and Dr Divakar Kamath (director, Google Cloud India), who graced the occasion as chief guests and jury members. Ashutosh Verma (analyst manager at Wells Fargo), Ananthapadmanabhan (IBM India), Madhsudan Rao (IBM India), Saurabh Gupta (senior developer advocate at DigitalOcean), Sharad Srivastava (senior engineering manager at Adobe Systems), Aravind Putrevu (senior developer advocate at Elastic) and Denver Jude (community manager at Devfolio) were the other executives present at the event.
With around 200 talented candidates making the cut after an intense review process based on their technical profiles, the final showdown was the intense 24-hour hackathon event which turned out to be a resounding success with several innovative solutions to real-world problems from participants.
The first prize of Rs 75,000 went to Kartik Kulkarni and Mahanthesh R for their project 'Extended reality haptic gloves: Feel VR with your own hands'. The second prize consisting of a cash award of Rs 60,000 was bagged by Saurabh Agarwala, Aakash Singh and Shashank Jaiswal of NITK Surathkal for their innovation 'The Safety Navigator: Find safe locations without Internet', while the third prize of Rs 40,000 was won by Apoorva M K and Govind Jeevan of NITK Surathkal for 'echoMark: A sound-based attendance management system'.