Imagineer is a technical event conducted by the two technical clubs, ISTE and ACM. It is an implementation of the organizations’ vision of encouraging students through practical learning by engaging them to solve different practical issues in today’s world. The event was born with the intent of promoting imagination, creativity, and innovation and enhance their technical prowess. The aforementioned was implemented through a wide range of problem statements that fall under an umbrella theme, covering various technical fields that were assessed by professionals from the fields involved. The theme for Imagineer’20 was “Coastal Conundrums”.

Relevance with NITK

Being students of NITK, the organizing team decided that the problem statements should be relevant to the participants and NITK both. This is how the team decided upon the theme “Coastal Conundrums” which served as an umbrella for the varying problem, this made the problems much more relatable to both the students and the institution. We found numerous solutions from a multitude of participants. These problems were taken to be relatively broad and had scalability from the point of view of the college to a national level situation.

Organizers experience conducting

Many factors come into play for organizing an event, it truly is an experience one must indulge themselves in. Many people befriended in the process of conducting this event and opened up realizations on what it meant to organize an event. Planning, organizing, marketing, media are just some of the gears that get the wheel rolling. The entire journey was amazing and it just encourages one to just do more. The experience was new, challenging, and at times even antagonizing but ultimately it was fruitful to conduct an event that was beneficial for all involved.  

Technical review

The entire event revolved around the central theme, but it still had different types of problem statements. The problem statements for this year were :

  • Monitoring the coast for enemy infiltration
  • Drowning in the sea
  • Smart ship to shore communication
  • Beach cleaning system 
  • Energy harvesting
  • Improving the lives of fishermen

These are broad classifications of the theme and had no pre-assumed solutions. Participants were encouraged to come up with new and innovative solutions and there were no restrictions on the type of solution to be built. A brainstorming session was conducted for two main purposes:

1. Participants were encouraged to come up with ideas for these problem statements. These ideas being discussed in a public environment opened the floor to an in-depth analysis of the statements with participants discussing ideas, feasibility issues, and possible obstructions.

2. Facilitate interaction between appointed mentors for each dedicated statement and participants that chose the respective statement so as to help them achieve a better understanding of the same.

 Some participants came up with software core solutions, while others came up with hardware-oriented ideas. The event was then conducted as an all-nighter weekend  They indulged in 36 hours of continuous, rigorous prototype building. The prototypes ranged from bots to websites to stationary models. The prototypes were evaluated based on a variety of judgment criteria including scalability, feasibility, and possible blockades by industry and academic professionals.

Prototypes built by students

  1. Sea reka – Enemy Infiltration Detection Systems

The whole project consists of two parts:

  1. Detecting all the ships near the coast using radars set up on the coast and marking their locations on the map. Finding their location using triangulation technology by calculating the distance of each ship from the receiver. The Radar is constructed by fixing an ultrasound sensor to a 180 servo motor which rotates in short intervals and scans the whole coast and sends the data to a processing software which plots the information on the screen 
  2. Then establish radio contact with the ships using RF and verifying their details using the encrypted identification information. The ships send an encrypted ship-specific code through 433MHz RF module to RF receivers which are placed in accordance with the triangulation principles. And if the RF message isn’t verified the coast is alerted and the ship is marked red on the radar and if the message is verified then the ship is marked blue on the map.

  1. Oppur-tuna-ty – Improving the lives of the Fishermen

Fish being a seasonal product, there exists a surplus supply during some months and a shortage during others. In the current industry, supply runs demand, not the other way around. To solve this we created a web application to act as the link between fishermen and retailers as well as technology to predict the demand for specific fish using time series analysis of past data.

The web application has 3 views

Fisherman:

  • The fisherman’s homepage has the list of fish displayed along with the demand which is generated by running our time series analysis model on previous data sets as well as specific demands from retailers.
  • Once the fisherman catches fish he can request a pickup from the distributor.

Retailer:

  • The retailer’s inventory is displayed on the landing page.
  • The retailer can request for fish through the web app.

Admin (Distributor)

  • Distributors have control over the requests of particular retailers
  • Admin has the distributor inventory and is a direct link between the retailer and fishermen.

Comments from participants

  • “Imagineer’20 was an exciting and hands-on 36 hours where we got to brainstorm practical solutions, build them ourselves, and see them work all the while learning and working with people from different branches.” – Hrithik Bhat, member of the winning team
  • “Imagineer’20 was a great experience right from the brainstorming phase to the workshops conducted by the clubs and the actual event as such. In the brainstorming phase, it was quite interesting to see how different people approached the same problem in quite different ways and it helped me gain perspective.  The workshops were really informative and I was more prepared for the event after attending them. The event not only required us to build a prototype which tested us Technically but was a great learning experience on how to work with people in high-pressure environments and these are things which you can’t really learn in a classroom environment” – Harsh Jain, member of the winning team
  • “It was nice. I learned about how teamwork matters for the success in a short duration project, I learned that we have to hone our presentation skills to be a better professional and that we have to give our best in whatever task we have taken up.” – Venkat Vasan, participant
  • “Imagineer’20 was an amazing experience all the way from brainstorming to implementation. Given the time constraints and various problem statements, it was interesting to see how various teams approached the problems in different ways and it helped gain perspective and think from different angles. The event was a great learning experience that tested us on technical knowledge, time management, and working as a team under pressure. To build a working prototype and present it to industry experts in 24 hours was indeed a one of a kind experience.” – Aditya C, participant
Website

Brief Info: ACM NITK is a student chapter of the world largest educational and scientific computing society, the Association for Computing Machinery. At ACM NITK, we have five special interest groups - Sanganitra (specializes in fields including but not limited to Computer Vision, Software Development, Machine Learning and Big Data), Vidyut (specializes in fields including but not limited to Robotics, Power Electronics, Signal Processing and Machine Learning), Yantrika (specializes in fields including but not limited to Aerospace Engineering, Robotics, Automobile Engineering, Bio-Chemical Engineering, Structures and Materials), Kaaryavarta (specializes in fields including but not limited to Business, Finance, Economics and Marketing) and Saahitya (specializes in fields including but not limited to Literature, Philosophy and History). ACM NITK plans and organizes a wide range of events that include technical workshops, guest lectures, online events and various other competitions at NITK, throughout the year. ACM NITK also works on various projects to encourage learning and contribution to society.