Students create Disaster Management solutions at Microsoft Academia Accelerator Program
Microsoft India hosted AXLE, an annual showcase of collaboration between Microsoft and academia, bringing together Computer Science faculty, Microsoft leaders and employees, several industry influencers and students from engineering colleges in India who showcased ways of building technology to predict or manage natural disasters better.
Academia Accelerator is one of Microsoft’s campus engagement programs aimed at building a deep, long-term association between industry and academia in India. Academia Accelerator Showcase provides mentor support, publishing support and pitch support and eventually provides the opportunity for the best among India’s student developers to hone their CS skills further.
“Academia Accelerator aims to provide insights to students about important technology trends and practices and adding industry know-how to the existing Computer Science curriculum. At Microsoft, we see unique ways of how AI can be used to improve products, services and how fostering the dialogue on the beneficial use of AI can help in enabling long term sustainable solutions to large scale challenges.” said Chitra Sood, Director Business Management, Microsoft India (R&D) Private Ltd. “India has immense potential to be a hub of development for AI driven solutions. Microsoft’s engagement with the Academia reiterates our commitment to engage and enrich the innovation journey of students in Engineering schools. It makes AI and its benefits accessible and drive digital transformation at the grassroot level. We are excited by the enthusiasm shown by students using AI and anticipate that they will apply their learnings from this challenge through their career,” she added.
The theme for Codefundo++ National Challenge under Academia Accelerator was “Build state of the art technology to predict or manage natural disasters better”. The challenge had 5000+ participating students across 21 colleges, and 350 + new projects as Academia Accelerator program celebrated its seventh year of collaboration with students and faculty in India. Top 21 teams showcased their solutions at the new Microsoft Campus in Bangalore.
Topics such as AI for Earth: Solutions for Global Environmental Challenges, Health Data Collaborative Enabling AI Network and AI on the Edge and for the Edge to Design Smarter Cities were amongst the favoured themes which were discussed during the keynote sessions at the Showcase. AI for Earth is a $50 million, 5-year commitment from Microsoft to put AI at work for the future of the planet. Launched in July 2017, its focus areas are climate change, agriculture, biodiversity and water.
Winning Team Projects
IIT Madras: UAVs for Disaster Management (WINNER)
An end-to-end autonomous system, to provide precise information about where exactly the people are stuck, with the use of UAVs which are powered with AI and Computer Vision. The system can efficiently distribute the drones to cover maximum area, and perform intelligent tasks such as detecting people (both visible and partially visible), whether they are able to move or not and activity recognition to help in optimising the resources available.
IIT Guwahati: DUBG (First Runner up)
DUBG is a mixed reality app for efficient post disaster management. Rescuers are busy during operation, which is why this app is based on Mixed Reality so that rescuers don’t waste time on pre-planning their routes and operating any device for communication. DUBG makes basic tasks like communication, navigation and current status monitoring easy for rescuers. The team’s vision is to create an Augmented Reality based navigation system enhanced by voice assistant to make the rescue drives hassle free. Using the current technology of Microsoft such as Mixed Reality and Azure Speech Recognition, the IIT Guwahati team has reimagined current disaster management system.
IIT Jodhpur: Disaster Chain (Second Runner up)
The project is a distributed IoT-based solution, deployed in different sections / rooms of the building with the target as home / building automation solution, which acts as an early warning system and takes precautionary measures on detection of disasters, offloading crucial immediate steps from the cloud to edge, while staying connected to the cloud for data storage and further analytics. It works with an Android app (skinapp), using an exported tensor flow model trained on Microsoft’s custom vision service (cognitive services) to predict skin diseases offline (for survivors rescued from the disaster zone)
