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Class 12 students beat techies in Gridlock Hackathon
Two class 12 students from the city, Chethan Mahindrakar and Atmik Ajoy, beat techies from major IT companies and even students from IITs to make it to the third spot in the ‘Gridlock Hackathon’, conducted by Flipkart to celebrate its 10th anniversary.
The month-long hackathon invited solutions to Bengaluru’s perennial traffic problems. On July 8, the top 10 entries were judged by a panel including Flipkart CEO Binny Bansal, Sridhar Pabbisetty of Namma Bengaluru Foundation, and Abhishek Goyal, Deputy Commissioner of Police (Traffic-East Division).
Chethan and Atmik developed an application called “Road Smoothness Detector” to detect and record obstructions such as potholes and speed breakers on roads. “When we were in class VIII, we took part in the civic fest conducted by Janaagraha where we had to fix issues of one specific stretch of road. After its conclusion, we felt that there was a need for ranking roads based on their quality and that is how we got this idea,” said Chethan, student of Bangalore International Academy.
Users have to turn on the app and place it on the car’s dashboard before beginning their drive. Using the GPS feature and the accelerometer, the app detects obstructions on the road. The makers say that the data could be used to warn people about bad roads, alert authorities about potholes and even to create “road smoothness rankings” on the lines of the Swachh Bharat rankings for cities.
They have been working on the prototype since class X and have had to teach themselves new skills to build the app.
“First of all, we had to learn coding. We had to do a lot of research about the accelerometer sensor in phones. We also had to use mathematic formulae such as the Euclidean distance formula because the app depends on it to record obstructions,” Chethan said.
Chethan, and Atmik, who is a student at Amaatra Academy, have ideas for more features but for now they want to focus on their academics. “We want to include features such as integrating it with maps so that users can get directions to their destination and also know what quality of roads to expect,” said Chethan, who wants to become a computer engineer and create more such solution-based apps.
The month-long hackathon invited solutions to Bengaluru’s perennial traffic problems. On July 8, the top 10 entries were judged by a panel including Flipkart CEO Binny Bansal, Sridhar Pabbisetty of Namma Bengaluru Foundation, and Abhishek Goyal, Deputy Commissioner of Police (Traffic-East Division).
Chethan and Atmik developed an application called “Road Smoothness Detector” to detect and record obstructions such as potholes and speed breakers on roads. “When we were in class VIII, we took part in the civic fest conducted by Janaagraha where we had to fix issues of one specific stretch of road. After its conclusion, we felt that there was a need for ranking roads based on their quality and that is how we got this idea,” said Chethan, student of Bangalore International Academy.
Users have to turn on the app and place it on the car’s dashboard before beginning their drive. Using the GPS feature and the accelerometer, the app detects obstructions on the road. The makers say that the data could be used to warn people about bad roads, alert authorities about potholes and even to create “road smoothness rankings” on the lines of the Swachh Bharat rankings for cities.
They have been working on the prototype since class X and have had to teach themselves new skills to build the app.
“First of all, we had to learn coding. We had to do a lot of research about the accelerometer sensor in phones. We also had to use mathematic formulae such as the Euclidean distance formula because the app depends on it to record obstructions,” Chethan said.
Chethan, and Atmik, who is a student at Amaatra Academy, have ideas for more features but for now they want to focus on their academics. “We want to include features such as integrating it with maps so that users can get directions to their destination and also know what quality of roads to expect,” said Chethan, who wants to become a computer engineer and create more such solution-based apps.
First place - Team Affine_Anonymous for the project ‘Smart Traffic Signal Switching’
The team of four analysts, Supradeep Das, Suraj Mishra, Harshit Gupta, Avinash Hinduja, presented a system which would use real-time traffic data from Google Maps and Bing Maps to change the signal dynamically based on the traffic flow. Late in the night, when traffic is less, the wait time at red signals will be less, unlike the current system which has a standard wait time.
Second place - Vaidyanathan Subramanian for ‘by2rides’
The Flipkart employee developed a carpooling service which is centred on the ride-giver rather than the ride-taker. The service aims to solve the existing problem with ride-sharing services which use money as an incentive, where the taker gives ‘driver treatment’ to the giver. Vaidyanathan is in the process of rolling out the service in Cessna Business Park where he works.
The team of four analysts, Supradeep Das, Suraj Mishra, Harshit Gupta, Avinash Hinduja, presented a system which would use real-time traffic data from Google Maps and Bing Maps to change the signal dynamically based on the traffic flow. Late in the night, when traffic is less, the wait time at red signals will be less, unlike the current system which has a standard wait time.
Second place - Vaidyanathan Subramanian for ‘by2rides’
The Flipkart employee developed a carpooling service which is centred on the ride-giver rather than the ride-taker. The service aims to solve the existing problem with ride-sharing services which use money as an incentive, where the taker gives ‘driver treatment’ to the giver. Vaidyanathan is in the process of rolling out the service in Cessna Business Park where he works.
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(Published 10 July 2017, 21:21 IST)
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