 We are back again with another interesting episode of how to ace the hackathon. The purpose behind this talk show is basically for the first time aspirants to make the smart India hackathon process more simpler and finally concluding it to become a winner. This talk show specially curates a bunch of previous edition smart India hackathon winners which talks about their first hand experiences about the hackathon. So without further ado we welcome another previous edition Mr. Shivanan on the show, hi Shivanan and we hope you are as excited as we are. Yeah, hi Shivanan, hi hello everyone. Great, I hope you are doing fine and to start with for all the people who are listening and watching to this show right now, I would like to firstly congratulate you again to be a previous winner and I would like to start this discussion with you know a basic experience in a nutshell how was smart India hackathon for you as an experience was. So yeah, so first of all I want to convey that smart India hackathon is really a good platform for UG students to experience and display their innovative and creative ideas. So there has always been this talk about Indian education system that they do not serve practical implications of what they teach in the curriculum. So I think government has brought a great initiative called smart India hackathon whereas students can actually apart from the curriculum or learning step up to bring up their ideas, display them and go to be winners. Right, great rightly said. So Shivanan if I may ask what was the first time how was it that you heard about smart India hackathon? Yeah, actually I had been practicing participating in hackathons earlier also before participating in smart India hackathon I was a winner of other hackathons too. So I was very keen in participating hackathons and I knew already that some of my seniors who are winners of smart India hackathon too. So I knew through that basically through my seniors. Perfect, so basically the idea for us also was to you know create awareness and ecosystem among every institute at every corner of this country you know and to come up with innovative solution so that finally it in turns helps the nation in further development. So that's great. So as you told that your seniors are also participants of smart India hackathon so you were very much familiar with it. So we will go. Yeah in fact they were winners. Okay, great. So you have a legacy of you know smart India hackathon winners in your college. So that's something great, yeah, good, good. So Shivanan as you all also are aware that you know this talk show is basically for the first time aspirants who will be in turn the participants and finally maybe the winners as well. So let's talk in that context where something from your end can act as an input for these participants or aspirants and in turn help them during the entire process of smart India hackathon. So to start with the initial phase where you know the initially the idea has to be submitted against a particular problem statement. So what was your problem statement which ministry you were competing for and you know what was the initial experience for the initial idea submission. Yeah, that's a great question actually. So I'll break down your question and answer, question and answer accordingly. So first of all my ministry which I competed for was DRDO, Defense Research and Development Organizations. And my problem statement was detecting and identifying drones in sensitive establishments and tracking them and tell them whether they are approaching or exceeding this one. I gave a gist of the problem statement and coming to the second part important things that has to be done to you know go through the IDA submission phase to the next phase. So a very important thing is that first of all it's very important to have a good team. You know the team should comprise of expertise along all the domain. For example I am from electronics domain, one should be there who is from software domain who can code platforms well, one should be there who is really good at presentation. A person should be there who can manage the team well, that's the leader. So it's really important to have a good team and to the smart end hackathon is a very big hackathon, it's the largest hackathon. It has around 400 for our time it had around 400 software problem segments. So it's really important at the first stage itself which problem you choose because you know further you are going to implement it. So there should be a careful thought sitting with the team and going through all the problem segments and picking those which interests you, like which is the expertise of your team. There should be a cut feeling that you would win if you choose that problem statement. And one more trick is that you can actually see how many of them have submitted the solution on the SH platform. So make sure you pick the problem segments where the submissions are less. That's a trick I can tell. Rightly said Shivana. So basically a good team is very much required and on the top of it I think a good team leader who can you know entail the entire team and take them till the whole journey of the hackathon is very much important. Adding on to that I think a good mentor, there could be many chances where there could be many challenges that the team faces. So exactly there is a mentor which is very much important during this entire process. It could be an academician, it could be an industry expert. So that is I think would be and you will also agree to it. And rightly said as a third point that the trick that you gave that you know attend or submit your ideas against the problem statement where less number of solutions are there. But actually sometimes just giving you a insight of it sometimes the problem submissions, the idea submissions are really less. Sometimes those ministry is back out also. So it could be acting against you also. So in vice versa you know the idea is submit as many as ideas that you can do against a multiple problem statements that increases your chances to you know qualify the initial idea screening phase also. So that's pretty much said. Now I would like to ask you because there's a typical template where you have to put the idea in the initial phase. So is there any input that you would like to give that what that presentation that two important slides must contain while you submit the idea? So first of all I would agree with you that to submit to different solutions that's really I agree with. So coming to the next part what should be included in the presentation? That's actually very good question. So in my case what we usually do our team usually used to do was that we first used to write abstract of what we are doing actually and just in crux like not elongating on things to be brief and to the context and write crux of what you want the evaluators to pick up from your idea. So ideas should be very specific and very unique actually and the two things which I suggest would be to first to write abstract and then a gist of what your solution is what a unique solution you have proposed. That's what I would like to suggest. And also one more thing it's really important once you write these two things to get evaluated from your mentor. In my case I was very grateful to have industry like academic mentor. She was a PhD from IIT Delhi. Her name is Dr. Umma Muthengudi. I was really grateful to have her. I was actually a research scholar undergraduate researcher under her. So she used to verify our abstract and her inputs really helped us a lot. So as you said it's really important to have a mentor, good mentor. So viewers you just heard it from the horse's mouth. You know a good mentor is of course needed and also be very precise and very to the point when you're submitting your ideas because these ideas are evaluated by multiple industry experts. So these industry experts are really well versed professionals from the industry. So when they are looking at your idea they are looking what exactly you are thinking while you will be developing that prototype. So be very precise be to the point and talk about the technologies that you will be using while you will you know putting your ideas forward into the next step. So yeah. So Shivanan coming back to the next question. Once the ideas are submitted what kind of anxiety or curiosity does happen among the team and the team leader and the members. So yeah your experience. Yeah actually it's a great period I guess it would take around 20 days to get the results published after your idea phase. So that's a period where you can you know build upon your idea implement the first steps and yeah there would be curiosity there would be like you know the team would be selected or not those things would be there but if you are confident on your ideas then there should be no way it should get selected. So as you heard him be very calm. If you are selected well and good. If you are not selected then that's not the end there are many more additions and many more hackathons that will come up in the future course right Shivanan ok. So you know once you screen through the initial idea phase then there's a pretty much gap where you know you start building upon your ideas and parallelly there are some mentoring sessions also that happens for the shortlisted teams. So how about those period when you were you know shortlisted in the initial phase and what what were the things that you underwent during that process till the announcement of the nodal centres for the grand finale. Yeah good question actually. So it's really important to I have been selected and let's do in the last week what we can do and we'll see we'll go to the nodal centre and see what will happen it's not that you should build upon your idea the moment you get shortlisted for the idea phase you should really think upon it verify every stages of your pipeline or whatever your solution is check actually mentoring is what comes here. So mentors give their inputs you should actually rectify according to their inputs and go forward with your solution. So basically there was some in your case while you were shortlisted and those two I around I think there's a period of around 60 days 50 days where you finally end up for the grand finale. Whether any sessions that were organized from the ministries and or from the industry experts or any kind of additional inputs that were given to you during those training periods. Yeah I guess there were two to three YouTube live sessions that went in our case to how to approach the finale. How should one prepare how can one stand out in the finale with their solution. I think Abhay J.R.S.R. and then that YouTube live session twice and yeah we were also listening to those things. Great viewers you just heard it that during those periods once you're selected or shortlisted in the initial round there are a couple of training sessions that also happens from the industry partners or from the experts from the ministry or if not you know the vice chairman and the chief innovation officer Dr. Abhay J.R.S. himself takes out his valuable time to give insight about this hackathon and how what all pointers that you should keep in mind while you know while working on your prototype. So yeah be very calm start working from the day one once you are announced as a shortlisted candidate for the grand finale don't wait till the end otherwise you might lose out on many such good ideas. So yeah she won. So once you moved out from those two months of training periods and you are finally allocated a particular nodal center. So were there any challenges initially I am also adding on to one more question here that because we keep a female student mandatory in each of the teams. So first question was there the female student there in your team and second question once the nodal center was announced any kind of challenges that you face and how did you overcome because you have to be physically present over there for 36 hours or more you know. So tell me about that. Yeah definitely there was that's a I think a criteria from smart in hackathon to have a female student in the team and yeah we had a female student in the team and come into the challenges part the biggest challenge is that the traveling part you need to arrange yourself in such a way that you don't get tired for the 36 hours long hackathon. I would suggest a very important thing here to sleep like at least 12 hours before you reach the nodal center because you would not have any sleep in those 36 hours trust me. So it's very important to have a sleep a night before you travel and travel to the nodal centers be cool become and yeah go for the 36 hours hackathon. So viewers don't get scared of you know though he has mentioned that have a good sleep but I think the energy itself is so high during those 36 hours with all the stakeholders being a part of it I don't think you know sleep would be a matter but of course health first. So as he mentioned take good care of health before the hackathon rest of course during the session during the events you do get time when you know you can intermittently your team can go and have a some resting period and then come back join your team so that is that is the whole thing. So Sivanand now that we have reached the grand finale nodal center what was your first strategy you know before starting the hackathon and how was the entire experience during all your mentoring session your evaluation session and the process flow of the hackathon if you can talk a bit about it and what are all tips that you can give to you know the first time aspirants for this yeah. Yeah sure so I would like to say that we didn't had our mentors coming to our nodal center there was only our team and coming to the nodal center parts it's very important to know that during our time we had three evaluation sessions so we knew that beforehand so whenever you know what's going to happen like how many evaluation sessions are going to happen in the span of two days it's very important to know that what you show in each of the evaluation sessions that matters a lot how your solution brings impact in each and every stage how do you pitch your solution differently in each stage because in every evaluation stage there will be different judges coming there will be different people who are coming that they're going to score you for which you would be again becoming the decided whether you will become a winner or not so it's really important to decide whenever the first step when you reach the nodal center it's important to decide what's your plan of action in each of the evaluation sessions that would be held in the two days long ahead so yeah viewers you heard it again have a very clear mindset on what exactly you want to show while you show your you are building your prototype what exactly is the scalability or what would be the impact of your prototype on the solution that you are proposing because again the evaluators are the industry experts so they know in and out very well so they are here to judge you or check whether whatever solution that you are proposing is actually in real time is applicable and for further stages is there a possibility of scalability of those projects so be very you know very sure about each evaluation round what you are up to you know that message should go clearly to the evaluators thank you so Shivannan if I would say that give a couple of master tips for these first time aspirants you know who is coming for the first time to these kind of hackathons what could it be and I think that should help yeah so that's a good question there are good questions actually so whenever you read whenever you come to the nodal center it's really important to you know to have in mind that there are four other teams who are actually thinking similar to you who want to beat you at every phase who want to be ahead of you at every phase so one master tip I want to give here is how is your idea standing out from this obviously you don't know what's their idea but the thing to know here is that everyone would be on the similar phase on on the same things that you are thinking they want to win the win the hackathon so how you stand out by you know being unique from the other side is what is the key and how well use your implementation that's a good part good thing actually how well you portray your implementation how well is your products scalable that's also important that judge actually is interested in so that's a tip from mine. Thanks Shivannan that was highly insightful for the first time aspirants who will be joining in this year edition and hopefully they turn out to be winner with your inputs thank you for taking out this wonderful time of yours and helping out these first timers and we wish you all the best for your future endeavors also thank you so much. Thank you so much. So viewers that was Shivannan for you who knows next time maybe I would be interviewing you so that's from our side prepare well participate well be confident and win the smart India hackathon for more interesting talk shows stay tuned to the channel how to ace the smart India hackathon till then have a good day.