​Pragyan Hackathon 2017

Pragyan Hackathon 2017, presented by SAP Labs and SAP Internship Experience, and
co-sponsored by SPI Cinemas and SPI Cinemas Externship, took place on 16th & 17th
December at SAP Labs India, Whitefield, Bangalore. The aim of the hackathon was to support
developers and aspiring entrepreneurs looking to architect their ideas. This was the fourth
edition of the Pragyan Hackathon, offering participants a chance to win INR 2,00,000 in cash
prizes and goodies.

It was inaugurated by Mr. Nithil Harris, Chairperson of Pragyan, who welcomed the participants
and gave them an overview of Pragyan. The Overall Coordinator of Pragyan, Mr. Chandish U,
briefed the gathering about the hackathon, detailing the rules and regulations of the programme.
Mr. Srikanth, Vice President for IoT Digital Connected Assets at SAP, delivered an enthralling
speech on the subject of digitisation. Subsequently, Ms. Neeti Agnihotri, Assistant Manager of
Experience and New Initiatives at SPI Cinemas, spoke about the entertainment sector and
possibilities of hackathons being developed for the cinema sector in the near future.

55 teams comprising of 120 eager participants were off to a start at 10:30 AM on 16th
December. The hackathon then went on for a gruelling 30 hours during which teams had to
fabricate an idea and develop the product. The ideas had to based on the one of the six
domains presented to them. These included Entertainment, Organisational Automation, Social,
Financial Technology, Education and Sports.

Github, who were returning to associate with Pragyan Hackathon for the second consecutive
year, oversaw the Myoctocat competition held alongside the hack. For this competition, one had
to design their own version of GitHub’s popular mascot and tweet their result to
@GithubEducation including #MyOctocat along with the event hashtag #BeyondTheSemicolon.
A special SAP Rapid Fire was also held, where participants of the hackathon were asked
questions in quick succession to win exciting goodies on the spot.

An initial shortlist of 10 teams was selected by the judging panel, based on the teams’ selected
problem statement and their approach to it.

The hackathon came to a conclusion at 4:30 PM on 17th December, following which, the
shortlisted teams were judged by a panel based on the authenticity and novelty of their ideas as
well as the functionality of the software. The third place of the Hackathon was awarded to Aman
Malali, Shishira R Maiya and Ahamed Shoaib, who developed a project in the domain of
Organisational Automation, winning a special mention from SPI Cinemas. The runners-up was
the team comprising of Trivikram Muralidharan, Aakash Arora and Rishi Swethan, who created
a product in the Entertainment domain, also winning a special mention from SPI Cinemas. The
first place of Pragyan Hackathon 2017 was bagged by Sai Hemanth B, Tanvi Kumar and
Shivashis Padhi, who worked to create a community-driven project for providing publicly
available datasets, powered by blockchain technology.

As the hackathon drew to a close, all the participants were thoroughly satisfied with a productive
and informative weekend and the event was declared a success.