Students create innovative apps at hackathon

Rahul Jain

The UNESCO India– Africa Hackathon is an annual event that brings together students, educators, teachers and the research community of India, along with its African partners, to tackle the challenges faced by their respective countries and serves as a facilitator for cultural amalgamation. This year, the event was organised at Gautam Buddh University in Uttar Pradesh, from November 22^nd to the 25^th. 

It focused on promoting engagement and collaboration of the student communities in India with those in Africa, with the aim of developing ingenious and out-of-the-box strategies to tackle the problems faced by people the world over. 

In the Energy domain, four problem statements were given to the competing teams:

1. Use of satellite image for finding out energy intensity (per capita energy consumption) of the city.
2. An App to calculate the rooftop area, reflectance from satellite data and the estimate saving in electrical units as the cooling load decreases by increasing the rooftop reflectance (by painting it white).
3. An energy saving monitoring App for employees.
4. Design a decision support tool (App/software) for EV adoption.

Under problem statement 1, team “Caffeinated Coders” consisting of Ashwin Balakrishna (Mentor), Krupasree Kalyan, and Divyansh Bansal were declared the winners. Their model proposed to tackle this problem via satellite images and other data picked up from the city using machine learning.

Under the second problem statement, team “Unstoppables” consisting of Ashish Papanai (Leader, India), Utkarsha Nehe (India), Anushka Agarwal (India), Alexis Yehadji (Togo), Dembele Bah Aly (Mali), Rejoice Tiwahlani Banda (Malawi) were declared winners.

Explaining what his project entails, Ashish said, ”We worked on a progressive web application to calculate the rooftop area based on the user's location (based on GPS, coordinates, and address). To approach this problem, we started by performing semantic segmentation of rooftops from satellite images/Google Maps API. The identified rooftops were numbered and later selected by the user for further computations. We calculated the area of the polygon plotted over the image. After that, we used this area to figure out how much heat the roof absorbed from the sun's rays (using solar irradiance). These calculations included factors such as the reflectance based on the colour and material of the roof, the current temperature, wind speed, and season. The data was finally used to calculate the energy required by the air conditioner to cool the room, considering the transfer of heat from the rooftop).

“The app we created at the UNESCO India Africa Hackathon in 2022 works on Android and iOS and can also be used as a desktop client. We achieved this through the flexibility offered by progressive web applications and used a state-of-the-art algorithm to segment rooftops with a mean IoU of 79.82 on the INRIA Dataset”, he added.

Vice President Jagdeep Dhankar and education minister Dharmendra Pradhan presented the awards.