2017 also sees special ‘Innovation Award’ category as Team Titans won the Tech Challenge title
Capgemini announced the winners of Capgemini’s Tech Challenge 4.0. Team ‘Titans’, comprising Kevin Wadera, Imayabharathi Sakthivel, Nisha Saini and Pawan Mude, won the Tech Challenge title for creating a proof-of-concept of a platform called ‘Ghar Wapsi,’ aimed at tracking and finding missing children who are lost every day due to long prevalent crimes such as child labour abuse and trafficking.
The top 75 finalists battled it out on the day of the finale in a live hackathon held at Capgemini’s Knowledge Park in Airoli, Navi Mumbai. This year, the challenge given to the finalists was to address the unique social problem of missing children. The final teams were asked to create a proof-of-concept of a platform that could help find missing children, fight against crime on children, and save them from falling prey to child labour abuse and trafficking.
Ghar Wapsi uses crowdsourcing to gain access to available missing children databases, from multiple agencies. The proposed solution facilitates the innovative use of advanced data analytics by leveraging sophisticated image and facial recognition to find patterns from unstructured data and then establish a correct match. Upon a match, the proposed solution enables real time alerts to relevant stakeholders including Government bodies, NGOs, authorities and parents. Additionally, the proposed solution offers a unique opportunity for citizens to upload real time images, in case they want to report an abnormal situation in public locations that could be potentially suspicious.
Special ‘Innovation Award’ marks Capgemini’s 50th Anniversary year
In celebration of Capgemini’s 50th anniversary, a special award category – the Innovation Award – was introduced this year. Team ‘Scorpions’, comprising of M Deepak Deepu, Chandrasekhar Valluru, Priyadarshi Prince Peter, Pankaj Sonu and Asokamoorthy K, won this prize for its entry, ‘Sense’. The team created the proof-of-concept for an intelligent image processing microservice that can scan missing people images from various external sources such as social media, web uploads, mobile scans and posters on walls/vehicles, and based on the keyword match trigger notifications appropriately to the relevant stakeholders. A plug-and-play approach makes it User Interface (UI) agnostic and would allow the solution to be deployed across diverse platforms such as the web, mobiles and cameras. Advanced data analytics enables mapping with existing databases. This data directly reaches the authorities and is simultaneously stored in a cloud based repository built on Blockchain to ensure that the data is safe and tamper-proof. The data then gets fed into a geo-surveillance tracker that helps identify the GPS location of the missing child. Independent agencies can also access ‘Sense’ to upload information on missing children and get immediate access to the relevant GPS location information. The solution can be potentially linked with CCTV cameras at traffic signals to offer real-time surveillance in the future.
Tech Challenge 4.0 received a record response with registrations from over 82,000 tech enthusiasts, over 448,000 page visits and 1.7 million page views on the Tech Challenge microsite. The finalists were evaluated by a jury panel composed of Ashwin Yardi, Chief Operating Officer of Capgemini in India; Santosh Madbhavi, Executive Vice President, Capgemini; A B Ravi, Editor – Special Projects at CNBC-TV18 and Amit Ray, Head of Business Process and Information Technology, Reliance Digital.
Ashwin Yardi, COO of Capgemini in India said, “Following three incredibly successful years of the Tech Challenge and the overwhelming response in the fourth edition, we made some important changes to our approach this year. We raised the numbers of participants in the finale to 75 from 40 last year and offered a unique challenge that assessed the ability of the participants to apply their technology competencies to a real life social problem. This issue of child trafficking and exploitation lies at the very core of our society. Finding a way forward to overcome this and taking a step towards creating a better society is indeed the need of the hour. We came across some unique and well thought-through solutions that has helped raise the bar of Tech Challenge this year.”
The winning team won prize money of INR 3 lakhs and has directly qualified for the final round of interviews for potential employment opportunities at Capgemini. The total prize money given in the fourth edition of Tech Challenge is over INR 18 lakh this includes both team and individual prizes.
