HackHarvard is a 36-hour free hackathon hosted by Harvard University every year and over 1,000 hackers coming from 284 universities and 22 nations participate in this mega coding competition.
A team of four 3rd year engineering students has bagged the best hack award at HackHarvard 2024. They competed with teams from institutions like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Harvard, Stanford and the University of Toronto. These students won the award with their sustainable AI-powered application named Sustainify.
Who are the winners?
The winner team includes Chukka Navneet Krishna, Kottakki Srikar, Amrit Subramanian and Surya Santhosh Kumar. These students are pursuing their BTech in artificial intelligence from Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Coimbatore. Amrit hails from Tamil Nadu and Santosh is from Kerala whereas Chukka Navneet Krishna and Kottakki Srikar hail from Hyderabad.
Krishna has shared his experience of HackHarvard and said, “We had serious competitors coming from the MIT, Stanford and Harvard Universities, but we stuck through.”
He explained the sustainable AI-powered application and 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.”
“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,” he further explained.
It was a dream come true for the Indian students. This win has helped them to work on detailed projects in a short span of time and helped them in developing more innovative and sustainable ideas.