The beginning

A Hackathon is a great way to learn skills and work on interesting problems as a team. Alibaba Intelligent Weather Forecasting for Better Life part of the global innovation series was personally my second ever hackathon and the first in the fields of ML and AI. This article is a quick read into our ideas and the project in general. For obvious reasons the underlying code has been privated and the Data pipelines, product designs along with any technology or idea that is of value has not been discussed in the article. We as a team are working on getting our ideas patented and hopefully soon we can share our ideas with confidence and no fear of plagarism.

This article is more about the team and the journey that we have been on for over a month. Personally I have learnt a lot during this time. Perhaps more than any course I had done upto now. For starters I had heard about the hackathon through my institute club channels. I had checked it out and it seemed interesting. At the time the information provided was that it was a challenge to make a solution that can better the world using AI and forecasting methods. It was a very challenging task as this was just my second hackathon and the first one, that i was leading.

Team building

I quickly got up to calling some of the people I know from college, school and previous hackathon. I only had one idea that if we are to have a unique and diverse solution, we needed a unique and diverse team. I picked a core team of AI developers Rizwan and Thiru my classmates from uni. The additions included Kavin Ramesh one of school buds, he’s an expert in public policy. Mihir and Anish, electronics and mechanical engineering students respectively. Lastly we had Yash a flutter developer.

Phase 1

It was really difficult at first, it took us a couple of sessions to come up with a list of good ideas. But once we got it down we were able to start work on it. For the first round we had to present our idea, there wasn’t much R&D involved. We just wanted to give our best going into it. after a couple of weeks the results of the first round were out, and we made the top 30. A total of 1200 entries and ours made the top 30. It was a surreal moment. We could’nt believe it ourselves for a few days.

Phase 2

Over the next month we spent a lot of time in research and development. We also had to show the financial and social feasability of the project. We just wanted to give it our all and try and bring out the full potential of our ideas. After a month we submitted our ppt, we also made a 40 min youtube video explainer. I guess it helped our case a bit.

Finale

At the end we were given the innovation award and a cash prize. I am extremely proud of my team for the work they have done and they way we have progressed the ideas over the timespan of the competition. This was a big learning experience for me, team building, leadership, tackling problems you never knew you could solve. It was all a new journey, but hopefully not the last.