Team ‘Juggernauts’ wins Capgemini Tech Challenge 5.0

Capgemini today announced the winners of its  Tech Challenge 5.0 hackathon. Team Juggernauts, the winning team, included a combination of students and experienced professionals comprising: Adithya AN, Meetkumar Patel, Rajesh Kumar Sundaramurthy, Sandeep Kogge, Suvajit Majumdar and Tejaswini Khambe. The team won the Tech Challenge title for creating a proof-of-concept of an application called ‘KUDAConnect,’ a platform designed to educate and enable citizens to practice effective garbage disposal and support waste recycling.

This year’s finale challenge theme was on environment sustainability. Finalists were asked to create proofs-of-concept for solutions in one of the three areas: reducing carbon emissions, better urban planning or waste management.

KUDAConnect, the winning solution, proposes an Android platform that will connect all stakeholders in the ecosystem, such as government authorities, local agencies and citizens, to create a seamless garbage disposal and waste management process for the community.  The proposed solution can be further upgraded to be more user-friendly by integrating Deep Learning and can also be integrated with Google Maps to identify common garbage disposal locations near the user location, bringing more efficiency into the process.

Tech Challenge 5.0 received a record response with registrations from over 1,35,000 participants, of which 36% were women, an increase of 22% in women participation over last year. The top 55 finalists battled it out on the day of the finale in a live hackathon held at Capgemini’s Pune Hinjewadi campus. The finalists were evaluated by a jury panel composed of: Ashwin Yardi, COO of Capgemini in India; A B Ravi, Editor – Special Projects at CNBC-TV18; Dr. Vahida Z. Attar, Head, Dept. of Comp. Engg. & IT, College of Engineering Pune, Pune; Girish Wardadkar, Head of Sogeti in India and Sarika Naik, Chief Marketing Officer & Chairperson – Diversity & Inclusion for Capgemini in India.

“We are overwhelmed by the huge success of the 5th edition of Tech Challenge. This year, we witnessed record participation with an increase of over40% in registrations, compared to the last season’s challenge,” said Ashwin Yardi, Chief Industrialization and Automation Officer, and Chief Operating Officer of Capgemini in India. “We believe that Tech Challenge has become one of the most popular engagement platforms that promotes innovation and connects tech enthusiasts from across India to exchange ideas and contribute positively to building a better society. I would like to congratulate all the winners.”

Tech Challenge is designed to identify the best programmers and tech enthusiasts from across the country. This hackathon aims to orient young techies to the skills needed in the age of digital disruption and provide them with the opportunity to solve real world business and social challenges using emerging technologies. In 2017, Tech Challenge finalists were given a social challenge where contestants had to create prototypes to solve the problem of missing children in India. The prototype was later converted into a real app called ReUnite, which is soon going live in the Android store.

The winning team won prize money of INR 3 lakhs and has directly qualified for the final round of interviews for potential employment opportunities at Capgemini.

Capgemini is one of the largest recruiters of talent from campuses in India, with over 11,000 hires from campuses in 2017. In line with its strategic focus on talent acquisition, Capgemini has raised entry-level salary to INR 3.8 lakh. Capgemini maintains strong connections with academia through events such as Tech Challenge, Tech Fiesta, faculty development programs, seminars and workshops conducted across 40 strategic colleges. Students selected from the strategic colleges get a chance to ace their careers with Capgemini by starting work on a digital technology of their choice.