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.
The Fifth Elephant is a community of practitioners, who share feedback on data, AI and ML practices in the industry. If you like the work that The Fifth Elephant does and want to support its activities - review of Papers, Books, building the innovation ecosystem in India through hackathons and conferences - contribute by picking up a membership.
You can either submit idea for an existing project you are working on, or a new idea which you want to build. How to submit your project/idea for the hackathon Submit your project idea and outline here. expand
You can either submit idea for an existing project you are working on, or a new idea which you want to build.
Join The Fifth Elephant WhatsApp group to discuss your submission with the mentors. Or, if you are want to validate your idea/project before submitting, you can discuss it with the mentors, either in the WhatsApp group, or on DM.
Participants can work on their projects soon after submitting ideas.
Mentors will comments on the the submissions during the period. The reward of the hackathon is the feedback, not just the cash prize!
A hack day is organized in Bangalore between 2 and 3 Feb. Participants can bring their working projects to the hack day, and continue coding/refining.
Demo day for all hackathon projects - in person and remote - will be held on 3 and 4 February. The jury will decide on which projects qualify for cash prize of Rs. 1,00,000 (one lakh rupees only).
Participants can propose projects around some of the following ideas:
AI for Scientific Research: e.g. Protein folding models, climate models, drug discovery, image recognition for scientific research, simulations for material science, epidemiology, and more.
AI for inclusivity and accessibility: e.g. STT/TTS, automated audio descriptions (for non-voice content), automated color blindness correction, AI powered sign language generation, real-time AI powered captioning display for events, educational resources, and content translation across languages by leveraging multi-lingual models, adaptive content for differences in learning ability and/or neurodivergence, etc.
AI and creative expression: e.g., generative audio, video, text and visuals and ways to combine these in a production-oriented direction, including AR/VR/Gaming and OTT implementations.
AI in education: e.g., personalized learning plans, adaptive learning plans, content creation, translation with context, AI tutors, productivity tools, well-being improvement tools, etc.
AI for India: for e.g., India-specific law, models that focus on indic languages, renewable energy optimization, disaster response and relief, education accessibility.
Context Due to fast-paced and long work environments, people are struggling to pay due to attention to their meals. Most of these meals are ready-to-eat either delivered by restaurants or packaged meals from convinience stores. Due to the purpose of these meals they cannot be a substitute for a balance diet; Especially if they are consumed without dietary planning. This can be contributed to high… more
Project Objective The number of tools which are available in Indian languages to subitle audio and videos in Indian languages are almost none. Yet that shouldn’t be the case, as now there are lot of open-source models supporting speech transcription in most of official Indian languages. This tool can be useful for subtitling audios and videos like Indian cinemas for Media Industry in general. more
Problem Statement The modern digital era has brought forth an abundance of information and content across various media formats, including audio and text. With this surge in content, there arises a need for tools that can assist in deconstructing, analyzing, and reconstructing this media to make it more accessible, understandable, and customizable for different audiences. The problem we aim to ad… more
Problem Statement As GenAI is on its path to revolutionise the way most things are done, we propose an innovative application of it. For the last many years, we have witnessed AI assistants that mostly assist with specific day to day activities like writing, setting up an alarm, etc, and mode of communication if typically either via chat or voice commands. We have designed a Music Assistant calle… more
Speech to text for Indian Healthcare If you had access to a speech-to-text model which is specifically trained on English audio taken from Indian speakers, it would be more accurate than the audio models trained on general audio data. And if we extend this to the medical domain, then the accuracy of such models would be significantly higher than the SOTA models like whisper which are not trained … more
Problem Statement: AI in education We plan to fine-tune the Llama 2-7B model on our custom datasets, made from school text books and then deploy the model using streamlit. The dataset would carefully curated for avoiding bias in the model. This way we can make chlidren learn and search for their doubts, without even giving them the access to interent. Due to fine-tuning, the model would be able t… more
Our idea is to develop an innovative solution for waste sorting using AI. The AI system will analyze images of waste items and classify them into recyclable and non-recyclable categories.our target is to create a user-friendly mobile app that allows individuals to take pictures of their waste, receive instant feedback on proper disposal of waste. more
Developed Framework for generating realistic medical datasets to enhance the training of AI-driven virtual patients. Used NHI Chest X-rays Datasets for generating synthetic data. Generation of medical datasets from the prompts of disease symptoms Validation of the generated dataset with the real life X-rays more
Problem Statement: To design, develop and demonstrate access of patient medical records using Ayush Bharat Digital Mission (ABDM) Unified Health Interface (UHI) for patient self-management, and share to doctors based on ABDM consent framework as and when requested by the doctor. more
Many of us in our day to day life find it hard to understand the medical reports issued to us . The aim of the project will be to create a model that can explain the medical reports generated by the doctors to a patient with as much ease as possible . Idea was suggested by Bhargava Subramanium of 5c Networks . more
This submission contains a list of knowledge resources shared by the curator of The Fifth Elephant Open-Source AI hackathon, Bharat Shetty Barkur. more
Problem In LLM world, the prompt is the input to the LLM and the output is generated text/image/audio/video. But when it comes to automation using the prompts, there are many problems faced by developers in Production Environments. more
Track : AI in education AI-Powered ATS Screening is an AI-driven system designed to streamline the initial stages of recruitment. By leveraging natural language processing and matching algorithms, the system intelligently analyzes resumes and job descriptions, providing recruiters with a curated selection of candidates that closely align with the job requirements. more
Chatbot for Mental Well-being Problem Statement In 2017, findings from the National Mental Health Survey revealed that approximately one out of every seven individuals in India experienced mental health issues such as depression and anxiety. This heightened awareness of mental well-being has elevated its significance as a focal point for development initiatives. Nearly 150 million individuals in … more
Problem Research - Today, many students, including those in 11th and 12th standard preparing for board exams and competitive entrance exams like JEE or CET, use PDFs instead of regular books. From my own experience as a former student, I noticed a common problem. It’s tough for students to understand everything from a PDF, and they often miss important points that could be the answers to multiple… more
AI can help people learn subjects and can help them remember it as well. The biggest problem is understanding the subject and breaking it down in smaller bits so that the people can understand it well. This is where will come in pictrure, the plan is to build an AI tutor that enables people to understand and can work in parallel with ANKI to help people remember things. more
Problem Statement Deepfake technology has increasingly become a tool for creating highly realistic and yet completely fabricated images and videos, posing significant privacy risks. This technology allows for the impersonation of individuals in various contexts, potentially leading to identity fraud, privacy breaches, and reputational damage for both individuals and organizations. The ease with w… more
Problem Statement: Training Large Language Models (LLMs) for Indic languages from scratch is costly and impractical. In response, we present a streamlined framework for adapting pre-trained LLMs like Llama and Mixtral8x7b to various languages, utilizing a compact dataset for cross-lingual tasks. Our solution includes fine-tuning and evaluation processes tailored for practical production use cases. more
