Samsung Innovation Awards 2017 held at IIT Kanpur

The winners were given cash prizes worth INR 2.5 lakh, while the five finalists received merit recognition from Samsung.

Samsung India conducted the seventh edition of its Samsung Innovation Awards at IIT Kanpur, to recognise and reward innovative and novel ideas with potential to revolutionise everyday living.

The winner of this edition was the team comprising young innovators, Kshitij Jaggi, Kumar Shivang and Rishabh Sahu. They worked on a peer-to-peer financial transaction app using blockchain technology in a distributed environment. The aim was to enable financial inclusion of chit fund subscribers with Circle, a mobile first solution for organisers to easily manage the members, thereby bringing in transparency in the whole process and creating credit history for all Indians.

The runner up was team Insomniatec, comprising students Kaustubh Mundra and Sankalp Rastogi, who proposed a project that uses an infra-red camera coupled with computer vision technology to detect drowsiness in a vehicle driver, while in motion, and provides in-time alerts.

One of the projects, Muskan Solid Waste, consisting Hari Shankar and co-founder Mewa Lal found a special mention at the awards. This is a startup that converts organic waste into high-yielding compost. The technique used reduces time for composting and produces more efficient manure compared to artificial fertilisers.

The winners were given cash prizes worth INR 2.5 lakh, while the five finalists received merit recognition from Samsung. The ideas presented will be further developed with the help of Samsung’s R&D Institute, Bangalore.

This edition of the Awards was initiated at the IIT Kanpur campus six months ago, seeking submission of innovative ideas from students. It was an open-entry process and received a large number of applications this year. The ideas were shortlisted by the professors at the Institute and researchers from SRI-B, who also selected the eight finalists.

The shortlisted teams presented their ideas to the jury at the campus. The winning project was selected based on the degree of innovation, feasibility, usability, relevance and overall impact on the masses.

This year, more innovative ideas and solutions were presented, which ranged from cloud-based healthcare data management system to an intelligence platform for law enforcement and defence agencies.

Speaking about the Awards, Dr. Aloknath De, chief technology officer, Samsung R&D Institute India, Bangalore, said “Through the platform of Samsung Innovation Awards, we want to encourage students to work on innovative ideas in the evolving areas of artificial intelligence, computer vision and IOT. When we see diverse and quality projects in these emerging technology areas, we can sense the pulse of our youth. Novelty of ideas, comprehensiveness in execution and impact of solutions are the yardsticks in selecting the winners. Samsung has been supporting deep-tech innovation at large, and this year’s event in IIT-Kanpur is one such initiative”.

Commenting about the Awards, Sameer Khandekar, associate dean, innovation and incubation, IIT Kanpur, said “Innovation and entrepreneurship ought to become an integral part of institutions of academic and higher technical learning. We must quickly transform into an innovation-driven society, where young minds understand societal needs, carve out opportunities and take calculated risks to become job creators and leaders. We are happy that corporates, such as Samsung are coming forward to help us create the desired ecosystem at IIT Kanpur”.