Megathon 2023

The recently concluded Megathon, E-Cell IIIT Hyderabad’s flagship event, witnessed over 400 participants come together to ideate and present their solutions to various real-world problems. Taking place over 30 hours from 3PM on 28^th October, the hackathon brought together participants from all over Hyderabad in H105 and H205 to compete for a prize pool of over 4 lakh rupees. 

Megathon is Hyderabad’s largest student-run hackathon with the 2023 edition being its 8^th edition. This year brought something different with food stalls that were set up in front of Himalaya. Dominos was the most prominent attraction on day 1. At the same time, Tickle Truck and New Quality Rolls, set up on both days, attracted a constant stream of students feeding their cravings, both midnight and otherwise. 

There were three problem statements that participants could choose from: Using satellite imagery to track paddy cultivation for the Government of Telangana, running medical query LLMs on edge devices for Qualcomm, or creating candidate profiles for KonnectNXT.  

Over the (nearly) 24 hours, participants came up with whacky, weird and innovative ideas. Many teams also implemented minimally viable versions to pitch to the pre-juries for the various challenges.  

After multiple rounds of gruelling judging, fierce pitching and nervous moments, team ‘Pikachu’ took the top prize of Rs. 75,000 for their solution. Team ‘Pandavas’ took away the top prize for the challenge sponsored by KonnectNXT, while Team ‘Ligmoid’ took the top prize of Rs. 50,000 for their solution identifying paddy fields from satellite images. 

Earlier, the opening ceremony had kicked off with Prof. Ramesh Loganathan sharing his wisdom from running the Center for Innovation and Excellence over the years. The CEO of Student Tribe then took the stage to introduce Student Tribe, Megathon’s outreach partner and a startup building a community for college students to find like-minded people. The problem statements were then introduced to the participants by the sponsors. 

Praneeth Jain, a member of 2^nd place winning Pentagon in the KonnectNXT challenge, said: “Throughout Megathon, we got to work with a lot of new technologies and learnt a lot. The event organization was very smooth, and we had a lot of fun! Winning 2nd place was unexpected for us, as we were outside our comfort zone the whole time, but it was a welcome surprise.” 

Editor: Harinie Sivaramasethu