Araz’s idea on improving the quality of online classes and assisting teachers won first prize in the software category. The theme for the national level Ideathon was Campus Life Post-Lockdown. The event was conducted by Institute of Engineering and Technology, Lucknow. Araz Sharma, a second year student of CSE is working on the implementation of the idea. The final round was streamed live on YouTube on June 6, 2020.
Centre of Innovation and Entrepreneurship (CIE) organized “Decypher: A Better Tomorrow”, a 48-hour virtual hackathon in association with the Entrepreneurship Cell (ECell) for all students at PES University. The hackathon started at 5 PM on Jun 12 and ran 48 straight hours ending on Jun 14 evening. The objective of Decypher was to enable cross-disciplinary teams to come up with innovative product &/or solution ideas that could make a difference in the post-COVID world.
The team of Araz Sharma, Rudra Prasad Baksi and Shamanth R Rao, made it to the Top 5 of the IEEE India COVID MOVE Hackathon Challenge Edition 2. The 48hr online was open to individuals and teams from industry, startups and academia including students from India. The team’s solution addressing the challenge of Remote Access to Education won the fourth prize competing against 62 submissions. The team presented a solution for reducing the amount of data required to access online video lectures enabling access to the educational video even with low bandwidth. Their approach involved extracting audio separately and taking snapshots of video leading to 50 – 70% less data being used with the learning content intact. The major outcome expected from this hackathon is for a design solution that is scalable, faster and easily replicable to cater to the current global need. Araz, Rudra Prasad and Shamanth are students of 4th semester of computer science. IEEE India COVID MOVE Online Hackathon Challenge - Edition 2 was held from April 17-19, 2020.