Indian Students Won HackHarvard 2024

Hyderabad: A team of four third year engineering students, two hailing from Hyderabad, bagged the best hack award at HackHarvard. Competing with teams from institutions like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Harvard, Stanford and the University of Toronto, the youngsters bagged the award with their sustainable AI-powered application, ‘Sustainify’.

The winners, Chukka Navneet Krishna and Kottakki Srikar Vamsi from Hyderabad, Amrit Subramanian and Surya Santhosh Kumar are pursuing their BTech in artificial intelligence from Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Coimbatore. Amrit hails from Tamil Nadu and Santosh is from Kerala.

Speaking to Deccan Chronicle, Krishna said “We had serious competitors coming from the MIT, Stanford and Harvard Universities, but we stuck through.” HackHarvard is a 36-hour hackathon hosted by Harvard University every year. With more than 1,000 hackers coming from 284 universities and 22 nations, the event is a sought-after coding competition for young aspirants in the field.

Krishna said “The tracks (areas of focus that participants choose to code) were not disclosed to us until the event began. As soon as they gave us the tracks, we distributed the work and began working.”

Explaining their project ‘Sustainify’, Krishna said, “It is an application which helps people live a healthy life with sustainable methods. There are two main features of the app. With the first one, a user can scan any edible item’s cover, tin or bottle in the app, and learn about the ingredients used in the food. The app will show the fat, sugar, sodium levels and other details about the food.”

Users can also upload their medical reports to the app, and the app will show them whether the product is good for their health or not based on the medical reports.

“The second feature is when the user scans the product, the app will give tips to the user on how to reuse or recycle the product instead of throwing it away. For example, if a user scans a soda can, the app will show three reusing levels: easy, medium and hard, with easy being reusing the tin can as a pen stand, a standing flower pot with medium difficulty and a bird feeder with a hard one. The app will show the estimated time for each method and will give step-by-step procedures for every method”, Krishna explained.

He informed that although the deadline given for the project was 36 hours, they completed the project, from brainstorming to finalisation, within 13 hours. “It was a dream come true for us. This win taught us how to work on detailed projects in a short span of time and will help us develop more innovative and sustainable ideas,” Krishna said.