The Fifth Elephant Open Source AI Hackathon started on 5 January 2024 and reached its finale with a Demo Day event on 12 April 2024, when the winners of the two month long contest were chosen.
The aim of this hackathon was to encourage individuals/teams to apply and incubate innovative AI ideas/use cases and publish them as open source projects.
- The hackathon contest participants worked with mentors for over two months to refine their ideas, and advance them to a stage where they are viable projects that could be pursued beyond the hackathon.
- the project teams worked on AI’s application in education, accessibility, creative expression, scientific research, languages, under the overall theme of AI for India.
- competing projects were judged on impact and relevance, innovation and creativity, technical soundness and code quality, scope of expansion, reusability and ease of adoption
As a campaign to raise awareness and drive up developer adoption of AI and open source technologies, the hackathon was a great success. It helped shine light on the agility that open source technology enables for creative and innovative developers.
“...each one of the contestants put in tremendous effort. And we saw the passion in every person, trying to do things not for winning, but about really building your projects. After a long time, I am attending such a hackathon where young folks are so passionate about building. Kudos to all of you”.
- Rukma Talwadker, Jury Member, Senior Principal Scientist at Games 24x7
“I really enjoyed judging all the projects - lot of interesting work. The Fifth Elephant has done a great job with mentoring and curating this hackathon”.
- Tanuja Ganu, Jury Member, Principal RSDE Manager, Microsoft India
“The hallmark of this hackathon was getting younger people to code for a longer period of time as opposed to a typical hackathon which turns out to be about — how do you build the coolest thing in the shortest period of time”.
- Sumod Mohan, mentor.
“What is impressive about this particular hackathon is, it is not just about cool ideas and fancy demos. It is actually about building a product or a software or a model that can live beyond the demo (and contest).”
- Soma Dhavala, team member at Project Seshu
“It was only through putting my ideas to code that I learnt what the specificity of implementing these (LLMs) were. I began my journey with a sense of hope and commitment towards FOSS principles, and the Hackathon only reinforced my belief that collaboration maketh a better product.”
- Sankalp Srivastava, Creator of Project Schematise
During the course of 12 weeks, the hackathon involved:
- Started off on 5 January 2024 and invited open source ideas and projects.
- Mentorship sessions in February for all project teams. Mentors included Abhishek H Mishra aka Tokenbender, Arvind Saraf, Bharat Shetty, Ramesh Hariharan, Sidharth Ramachandran, Simrat Hanspal, Sumod Mohan and Vinayak Hegde.
- The 10 best from 40 applications were chosen for the Demo Showcase.
- An involved peer-review process helped further refine projects between March 1st - 15th, followed by extensive rehearsals from April 8th - 10th, 2024.
- On Demo Showcase Day - we had project demos from 10 qualifying teams; 5 project winners were chosen on 12 April 2024.
🏆 Five prizes of ₹1,00,000 (One lakh rupees) per theme, were awarded to winning projects.
The prizes for this hackathon have been sponsored by Meta.
Note: Apart from the contest prizes, Microsoft has offered internships to the contestants.
- Ashok Hariharan heads data and business intelligence at United Nations Volunteers.
- Rukma Talwadker is Senior principal scientist at Games24x7.
- Shubha Shedthikere is a Senior Manager in the Data Science team at Swiggy.
- Sunil Abraham is the Public Policy Director for Data Economy and Emerging Tech at Meta, India.
- Tanuja Ganu is a Principal RSDE Manager at Microsoft Research India.
- Abhishek Mishra is a is creator of CodeCherryPop LLM series.
- Arvind Saraf is a computer scientist, engineering leader, entrepreneur trained at IIT, MIT and Google.
- Simrat Hanspal is currently spearheading AI product strategy at Hasura.
- Sumod Mohan is the co-founder and CEO of AutoInfer.
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