Applications are open for the SAMHAR-COVID19 Hackathon 2020 as announced by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) in association with NVIDIA & OpenACC.
Background
Pandemic outbreak such as Coronavirus outbreak can create huge challenges for the Government and Public Health Officials to gather information quickly and coordinate a response. In such a situation, Artificial Intelligence (AI) can play a huge role in predicting, minimizing and stalling its spread of the virus.
This opportunity will provide researchers to find solutions for Identifying, Tracking and Forecasting outbreaks of COVID19 and Facilitating Drug Discovery as well.
The intention behind this hackathon is not just to solve current Covid-19 situation but to prepare the research community to make use of HPC-AI tools and keep ready to predict outbreaks like this.
Areas of Focus
The problems related to COVID19 that will be solved during this Hackathon are as follows:
- Drug Discovery and Genome Sequencing: Human Genome is complex and has 3.2 billion base pairs. India became the fifth country in the world to sequence the genome of the novel Coronavirus, or COVID19, and share its data with the international community. Genome data is essential to build tests, find drugs and vaccines.
- Medical Imaging: AI has proven accuracy to detect patterns from Images. Healthcare images like CT provide crucial information and can be used to detect Corona Virus.
- Contactless Monitoring: To Explore Contactless monitoring of the outbreak, to explore usage of drones to help medical staff to transport medical samples and to conduct thermal imaging.
- Surveillance and Monitoring: Use of Computer Vision Techniques to automate monitoring crowd gathering or tracking possible carriers by looking at patterns like sneezing etc.
- Forecasting: Predict the cumulative number of confirmed COVID19 cases in various locations across India, as well as the number of resulting fatalities using various datasets from the states and union territories of India combined with Big-Data information available from Social Media.
- Data Mining: There are more than 44000 research articles on COVID19 already published and the numbers are growing. Use of AI and data analytics techniques to come out with solutions to help the medical community to analyze news reports and online content from around the world to recognize anomalies and predict critical events.
Eligibility
The hackathon is open to Researchers, Academicians, MSMEs, Startups and Industries with an objective to bring out Innovative and Implementable Ideas for Prediction, Forecasting and Building Healthcare Models that could revolutionize the way we interpret science of pandemic outbreaks using AI technology on Supercomputers.
Benefits
Participants will not only contribute to this hackathon for Noble Cause, but will also have opportunities to win awards.
Awards
In Round-1, the selected Innovative Implementable Idea (I3) Award entry (irrespective of the number of members in the team) will be rewarded with Cash Award of Rs. 10,000 (Rs. Ten Thousand) each and a ‘Certificate of Appreciation’.
In Round-2, the Top 6 Innovative Implementable Idea (I3) Awards will be given away by C-DAC under NSM as described below:
- Outstanding Innovative Implementable Idea (One Award):
Award will consist of a ‘Citation’ +
A Cash award of Rs. 2,00,000.00 (Rs. Two Lakhs only) +
Free 500 Hours* of CPU-GPU Computing Credits along with upto 200TB Storage on PARAM Series of Supercomputing facilities established under NSM and the 100 AI PF PARAM Siddhi-AI Supercomputer connected through NKN; - Excellent Implementable Idea (Two Awards):
Award will consist of a ‘Citation’ +
A Cash award of Rs. 1,00,000.00 (Rs. One Lakhs only) +
Free 300 Hours* of CPU-GPU Computing Credits along with upto 100TB Storage on PARAM Series of Supercomputing facilities established under NSM and the 100 AI PF PARAM Siddhi-AI Supercomputer connected through NKN; - Promising Innovative Implementable Idea (Three Awards):
Award will consist of a ‘Citation’ +
A Cash award of Rs. 50,000.00 (Rs. Fifty Thousand only) +
Free 200 Hours* of CPU-GPU Computing Credits along with upto 50TB Storage on PARAM Series of Supercomputing facilities established under NSM and the 100 AI PF PARAM Siddhi-AI Supercomputer connected through NKN.
In addition, participants will also be provided with:
- Compute Infrastructure: Access to PARAM Series of Supercomputing facility established under NSM (PARAM-Shivay, PARAM-Brahma and PARAM-Shrishti including PARAM-Shrestha and PARAM-Sangam) and to the latest NVIDIA Tesla GPU powered systems will be provided through National Knowledge Network (NKN) backbone.
- Datasets: Access to India specific datasets or sample data sets (on request).
- Training: Participants will be provided training on latest HPC-AI tools including C-DAC Tools like: TANGO: Small drug like molecular conformation generation and energy optimization to find right postures of small molecules in the database; HBAT: Big-data Analytics tool to Find hydrogen bonds in the simulation trajectories and water interactions; Parabricks: Genome Sequencing Toolkit; RAPIDS:Machine learning Library; DeepStream SDK:Streaming Analytics Toolkit; and AI GPU libraries from NVIDIA (wherever applicable).
- Mentorship: Mentors from C-DAC, Industry and Research Organization will guide the participants to help achieve optimal results during the course of Hackathon.
Terms of Participation
- Participants can update submissions multiple times till the Registration End date.
- Each entry can be submitted by a Team comprising of minimum 3 and maximum 5 members (Including the Team Lead).
- Participants will have to share the complete work activities with C-DAC. And C-DAC will have right to use the submitted application/solution for SAMHAR-COVID19 programs.
- Award can be for the Team/Company/Institution, as submitted in the Application and cannot be changed later.
- Submissions will be considered void if they are in whole or part ill-eligible, incomplete, damaged, altered, counterfeit, obtained through fraud or late submission.
How to Apply
Interested persons can apply by completing the online registration form
APPLICATION DEADLINE: 8th May 2020
