Applied Intelligence Hackathon, An Initiative by Accenture

From smartphones to cars to household appliances, Artificial Intelligence (AI) can make things simpler and more suitable for people. As people deploy AI technology to fulfil their personal needs, time spent on everyday tasks is freed up to take on more creative, innovative work. AI evolving rapidly, it's helping people from working in an office to performing daily activities as well as household chores. AI extraordinary access and impact on the ways people work and live. Accenture has incorporated the potential of AI and other evolving technologies to address societal challenges.

To deep dive into the world of data, AI, and the unlimited opportunities it offers, Accenture conducted a two-month-long Applied Intelligence Hackathon across India. The AI Hackathon, initiated on June 1, 2021, saw over 3500 registrations from engineering colleges and business school students as well as working professionals in India above the age of 18 years.

Centered on the theme of "Responsible impact with AI, to make the world a better place", the challenge focused on two critical topics for registered teams to respond to using AI including Pandemic related support capabilities and Mobilizing crowd-fund. It aimed at encouraging participants to dive into the depths of AI and develop tools, apps, bots, and other advanced solutions to address and solve these real-world problems.

The winners for the challenge were chosen from among nine shortlisted teams who virtually presented their ideas to a jury panel comprising of Accenture leaders during the grand finale, organized as part of Applied Intelligence Week (scheduled between July 26–30, 2021). The winners were selected based on the innovativeness of the solution, business applicability, and the underlying AI application as part of the solution.

The winners are:

• Winner: Awarded to the team Artificial Mind from GH Raisoni College of Engineering for creating a real-time online platform with the help of AI to cultivate data from various sources and provide relevant information which can be sliced and diced as per the user's requirements to help the society in its fight against COVID-19

• First Runner-up: Awarded to the team's Hat Static and Co-War from Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur (IIT-K) and Gayatri Vidya Parishad College of Engineering for Women, respectively

• Hat Staticfor creating an AI model that predicts the occurrence of COVID-19 based on symptoms and activities recommends policies based on trends identified in successful combat against Covid-19, a recommendation engine for COVID-19 researchers based on queries, and sentiment analysis and forecasting based on Twitter's Covid-19 hashtags

• Co-War: for creating a self-service symptom-based COVID-19 prediction solution that is powered by machine learning and helps in optimizing medical capacity and logistics planning

• Second Runner-up: Awarded to the team Covid Warriors from Sri Venkateswara University College of Engineering Tirupati (SVUCE) for creating an AI-powered data aggregation and scoring system which analyses data from multiple global sources, traffic videos, movement sensors, weather, Twitter, and social data to derive "Severity Index" per country and per state

• Special Recognition: Awarded to the team Covid Squasher from College of Technology and Engineering, Udaipur for designing an automated Covid-19 tracker & predictor tool