Hack your way through

With everything going online and the government urging people to work towards a cashless economy, the fear of fraudulent transactions has taken over the country. At #CrackTheCode, a hackathon organised by an online payment company from the city, three students from IIIT Hyderabad bagged second, third and fourth spots. The hackathon was held to create programmes and to come up with solutions to safeguard online financial transactions.

“The hackathon focused on building next generation of payment platforms and technology capabilities that enable B2B and B2C transactions to take place smoothly throughout the world. At the competition, every participant had two options to choose from — one was to go in for machine learning (solve real world problems) or to solve 10 coding algorithms within six hours,” says Nurendra Choudhary, a student of IIIT Hyderabad.

Nurendra had designed a solution for credit card fraud detection and received Rs 30,000 as the second prize. The third and the fourth prize winners received Rs 20,000 and Rs 10,000 each, respectively.

The hackathon was open to software designers, developers and creative technologists. Rajat Singh, who came third at the competition, is a BTech student. Sharing his experience at the event, the 22-year-old says, “I had fun solving real world challenges like how to detect credit card fraudulent transactions. I also got to learn a lot of new things about the Fintech (financial
technology) industry.”

Twenty-year-old Sourav Sarangi,  who bagged the fourth spot, says that he loves coding. Agreeing with Sourav, Rajat adds that a lot of other IIITians, too, love coding. “We have seen our seniors excel in coding and have followed their footsteps. At college, we discuss coding just like cricket or any other sport,” shares Rajat.

But for Rajat and Nurendra, their passion for coding is not the only thing that keeps them going. “Nurendra and I are very good friends. We are research mates and our chemistry is amazing! Both of us meet every day to play games like Counter Strike,” says Rajat. When asked about what they plan to do with the prize money, all of them said, “Will use it as pocket money!”