The Department of Business Analytics and Decision Science, ITM Business School, Kharghar “HACKATHON”
The Business Analytics Department of ITM Business School held its second Hackathon for the batch of Business Analytics (2019-21) under the guidance of Dr. Vishnu Ramchandran who is the Co-Founder & Chief Product Officer of Rubix Data Sciences.
Hackathon as an event, typically lasting several days, in which a large number of people meet to engage in collaborative problem solving through different technical approaches and techniques. The hackathon was a focused event with time and resource constraints to explore new modes of working in everyday environments, whether overcoming a technical impasse.
The Students with varied skill sets worked collaboratively to come up with novel solutions to initiate change in diverse business areas.
The Hackathon started on 5th October 2020 where students were introduced to the problem statements, background, methodologies to be adopted and the outcome expected from them. On the first day objectives and goals were made very clear to avoid any kind of confusion and have a smooth process with efficient and productive out.
The students were divided into four teams which had majorly roles like Business Analyst, Coder and tester
where two problems statements were allocated to two teams respectively as follows:
- Team 1 and Team 3: Captcha Recognition
- Team2 and Team 4: Entity Resolution and Data Matching.
The event started with brainstorming and Idea generation that checks the uniqueness and feasibility boxes where it must completely fulfill the singular purpose of the hackathon.
It was all loaded with passion, spirit of disruption, collaboration, innovation, requisite know-how, and energy.
The 12 days of Hackathon was divided into different stages as follows:
- Problem Statement Understanding
- Team Formation and Responsibility Allocation
- Research and Discussions for Different Approaches
- Feedback Sessions about the on-going process
- Prototype Development which included model and API
- Review
- Final Presentation with Working Model and its Demo.
These days were focused on learning and innovative thinking which fosters creative problem solving while boosting team spirit by crowdsourcing ideas from the young and diversified minds.
The Hackathon acted as a platform to ideate and collaborate on interesting real time problems.
The students of Business Analytics (2019-21) Batch understood programming knowledge, translating API documentations, Different Algorithms, debugging errors, presentation, model development.
Dr. Vishnu spent a lot of time going around each team, learning about their projects and offering constructive feedback. The students turned out to be very eager to share what they are working on.
A major thanks goes to Dr. Neena Nanda – HOD – Business Analytics Department at ITM Business School for identifying need of an hour and arranging such great learning events where students are encouraged to push themselves out of their comfort zone and try hands on something which is new and provides a great exposure.
The Hackathon ended on 16th October 2020 where all the solutions, protypes and final models were reviewed by the mentor Dr. Vishnu Ramchandran, Dr. Neena Nanda, faculties and even junior students. At the end , it proved to be a great learning experience for all the students and they loved the fact that that it gave time to learn how to implement real world implications of the allotted problems and they identified inner skills like ability to create something useful and learn from others on continuous