How I became the ‘Inspiring Innovator’ in ‘Anita’s Moonshot Codeathon’

Anita’s Moonshot Codeathon

Earlier this year I came across an online hackathon on ChallengeRocket exclusively for women technology enthusiasts ‘Anita’s Moonshot Codeathon’. The aim of the 3 month long hackathon as described by the organisers was to encourage women from interdisciplinary backgrounds to produce a creative solution to a socio-cultural or socio-economic problem.

The codeathon was sponsored and organised by Systers-AnitaB.org. Systers is an online community founded by Anita Borg that provides a private, safe online forum for women involved in the technical aspects of computing.

Submission Requirements

Inquisitive, I analysed the requirements for submission and started working on my project promptly.

The submission required the participant to come up with the following

• An innovative solution
• Prototype of the product
• A descriptive video
• A document explaining the product to the extent to which it solves the problem
• A presentation for the product demonstration.

Lane Changer

Motivation

I researched some important problems which required technological reforms and the one that captured my attention was the amount of fuel wastage in India as a result of poor traffic management. With the help of available statistical data and a few calculations I was able to calculate that the loss due to traffic congestion is estimated to be around $10 billion per day for each major city. Similar calculations allowed me to prove that simply increasing the average speed of vehicles could save up to 4.2 million litres of fuel in a single day! Thus, the idea of designing a convenient system to increase the average speed of vehicles, close to their most fuel efficient speed, was the motivation for my product ‘Lane Changer’.

Solution

Lane Changer is an intelligent traffic management system that aims to improve the traffic flow by computing intelligent recommendations for changing lanes to reduce overall traffic congestion. The system is designed to recommend changing lanes based on the vehicle’s most fuel efficient speed as well as optimum travel time. The system also ensures better traffic flow by allowing vehicles with similar fuel efficiencies to travel in a single lane. The system would be naturally a complex grid of computing devices installed in all vehicles, and at regular intervals on the roads to monitor the traffic. With a carefully designed algorithm, one can visualise the network of devices communicating with each other to develop the most fuel efficient traffic scenario.

Technical details of the project

Following my intuition, I started work on developing an intelligent recognition system to detect surrounding objects from a vehicle as captured from the device in the vehicle. I took inspiration from state-of-the-art Machine Learning algorithms like YOLO (You Only Look Once) and Mask RCNN (Region Convolutional Neural Network). Training and testing was performed on the network to give tolerable results in real-time. With improvements in computational and storage capabilities, we can aim for better performance.

The Python code for my model can be found here.

Submitting the project

All that remained was to complete the submission requirements. I worked on a prototype for the app using a prototyping tool, Axure. Learning Axure was a new experience, I was extremely impressed with the extent to which they motivate students by providing free licensed software. I jotted down all my ideas, statistical data and calculations to support the product description document. I worked on the video unleashing my creative inhibitions to create a video that was not only demonstrative but also fun and interactive. My presentation was crisp and professional.

My project can be viewed here.

Results

I’m sure all these added up to get me sufficient brownie points and ‘Lane Changer’ won the Inspiring Innovator award in Anita’s Moonshot Codeathon. I won an impressive VR kit which I’m currently working with to develop something better and improve my existing projects. And a few fun VR games never hurt anyone, do they?

Anita’s Moonshot Codeathon drove me to not only believe in finding a technical solution to problems prevailing in our surroundings, but also actively working on it. I plan to continue improving my model in the future.

I hope my experience turns out to be inspiring for young enthusiasts to spend their time participating in interesting and innovative initiatives towards a sustained future.