The Random Hacks of Kindness took place at Jaaga a creative common space in Bangalore in 5th June 2011 where hackers from all over Bangalore came together to solve problems in Disaster Risk Mgt and climate change. The problems were pitched by the subject matter experts in these fields and the hackers formed teams to tackle them.
The day began with a Key note by Professor Srinvasan Member of IPCC that won the the noble peace prize . The Key note talked about the perils of Climate change and its reprcussions on the human race based on scientific data , he also touched on how technology could help in predicting disasters before they could happen by making the data available to the masses .
Professor Srinivasan IPCC keynoting the Audience on climate change.
This was followed by pitching of the problems and choosing of the problems by the hackers to work on. Thus the Hackers made 11 teams that started to hack 11 solutions . This continued into the evening until 6pm . The event also saw the presence of the Architect of the Txtweb platform coming to mentor the hackers.
Architect of txtweb demoing the platform to the hackers.
Hackers working at Jaaga During RHOK
Mr.I.Vijay Kumar the CTO of Wipro was invited to be the Chief guest and he stressed on the importance of Social action among the youth.
Day 2 :
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The Next day began with a keynote by the Director of Entrepreneur network at Yahoo Mr.Bala who focused on Social entrepreneurship and stressed that ideation is easy but adaption is hard.
Some of the problems that the hackers tried to solve are as follows :
- Save your Souls : Feed twitter and severe weather forecasts to pre-registered subscribers in the affected location
- Flood Rescue : Helps the Authorities view all the people who have requested help on a map dashboard during a flood.
- Navigation of Emergency vehicles in India during high traffic density
- Natural Calamities Simulation and creation of awareness
- Facial Recognition for tracking people in disaster
- Finding Emergency services near you
- Helping Hand : Trying to bridge gap between NGO’s and common people who have excess food.
- Compilation of Disaster recovery data from specific disaster situations , to serve as repository of recovery strategies in future events and a scientific bank for research .
- SewerBOT : a robot that can be used in sewer lines to clear clogs thus avoiding human entrapment and save lives .
- DejaVU : Distributed Facial recognition system
- Professor Rajagopalan Professor at the International Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore, a founding member of Technology Informatics Design Endeavour ( TIDE) a not for profit development society which focused on developing and disseminating technologies that are economically attractive.
- I.Vijaya Kumar Chief Technology Officer of Wipro Technology.
- Ranjan Jaganathan Associate program manager at Yahoo.
- Omprakash Unique Identification Authority of India [UIDAI Govt of India].
- KK Sharma Unique Identification Authority of India [UIDAI Govt of India]..
- Sreekandh Entrepreneur ,open source evangelist ,Cyclist .
The hacker pitch concluded with the judges deciding the top 3 game changing hacks which were won by :
- Navigation of Emergency vehicles in India during high traffic density
- Dejavu : distributed facial recognition system
- Save your Souls : Feed twitter and severe weather forecasts to pre-registered subscribers in the affected location
Winners with their trophies
The Hackathon ended on a high note where the hackers looked forward to the next random hacks of kindness in December 2011 and an opportunity to help the world through technology and social action.
Hackers at Random hacks of kindness.
Some Resources :
Images from RHOK day 1 : https://picasaweb.google.com/spraveenitpro/RHOKBangaloreDay1June2011#
Images from RHOK day 2: https://picasaweb.google.com/spraveenitpro/RHOKBangaloreDay2June20111#
