WE HUB Collaborates with Hyderabad City Police to incorporate new technologies into policing

Hyderabad: WE HUB, India’s first state-led incubator to foster and promote women entrepreneurship, collaborated with the Hyderabad City Police to help them find innovative solutions using hackathon, to reduce and control crimes in the city. Today, WE HUB announced one overall champion of the hackathon who is awarded with a cash prize of INR 1, 00,000 and four other teams that are awarded with cash prizes of INR 20,000 each. These four teams will now further develop their ideas with the support of WE HUB.

The Hyderabad city police, WE HUB Government of Telangana, organised a 36-hour hackathon on 18th and 19th January at Kotla Vijay Bhaskar Reddy indoor stadium, Yousufguda. A total of 99 teams consisting of four members participated in the hackathon from across Telangana/ India. The teams included students from engineering colleges across Hyderabad, start-ups, corporates and other young innovators, participated in the hackathon.

The hackathon aimed at solving problems in the fields of cybercrimes, crimes against women and children, road-safety awareness and social media monitoring for tackling fake news. The participants were tasked with developing applications and solutions using emerging technologies like Artificial Intelligence, machine learning and data analytics. After an exciting battle amongst innovators to create solutions in 36 hours, each of them got an opportunity to pitch in front of a jury consisting of Hyderabad City Police, the WE HUB team, academia and business mentors from VC firms, corporates and innovation ecosystem enablers.

Deepthi Ravula, CEO of WE HUB, said, “The Government of Telangana has always been at the forefront of encouraging start-ups and entrepreneurial ideas. WE HUB collaborated with the Hyderabad police to organise the hackathon so that students, start-ups and corporates can understand and conceptualise ideas to solve the problems identified. The winning teams and the top 30 teams selected as a part of the hackathon will be further mentored to accelerate from idea to product stage by the Hyderabad Police, WE HUB, along with knowledge partners from corporates, academia and business.”

Shikha Goel, IPS, said, “The objective of the event was to elicit coding solutions from the participants for problem statements like cyber-crimes, crimes against women and children, road safety and awareness and social media monitoring. The hackathon was open for college students, start-ups, the IT industry, researchers and officials from the police, defence and other government sectors. WE HUB will lead the way in technical mentoring, prototyping support, technical up-gradation for the winning teams, along with the knowledge partners. The winning coding solutions will be the prototypes on which we will design the products to improve police functions and solve policing challenges.”

Anjani Kumar, The Commissioner of Police, stated that “Technology using machine learning and artificial intelligence is the need of the hour. We encourage the participants and young minds of the state to arrive at innovative solutions to address the most pressing problems and improve policing.”

The most innovative solutions were announced today. Here are the details of the winners:

Overall Champion:

ProjectD: The students built a hardware prototype for curbing sound pollution. A team of four students from MJCET is using ML to curb vehicular pollution. The winning team stated ‘This 36-hour hackathon helped us work harder and gave us an opportunity to prove ourselves. We also developed people skills along with working efficiently as a team.’

The three runners-up who won INR 20000 each:

· Life of a Girl: a mobile app designed by Hyderabad IIIT Students for the prevention of crime towards women and children

· Cyber Knights: A plugin to prevent cybercrime. Students were from CVR College

· Bietians: Students designed a hardware device to sense and prevent traffic accidents by mapping the most accident-prone routes and creating quicker access for ambulances.