NSE organised 'FutureTech 2018 Machine Learning Hackathon' sees participation from 165 developers across India

In a bid to encourage the use of machine learning applications in Indian capital markets, the National Stock Exchange (NSE) hosted a 30-hour live hackathon in Mumbai on 17-18 March. [caption id=“attachment_4397777” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] The winners of NSE FutureTech 2018 Machine Learning Hackathon, The Matrix comprising of Nikhil Lobo, Manish K., Subhnesh Kumar and Prashant.[/caption] With pre-registration of more than 400 developers, the NSE FutureTech 2018 Machine Learning Hackathon saw more than 165 participants turn up which included a good mix of coders, designers as well as data analysts. The participants were asked to tackle real-life problems covered under eight broad problem statements and come up with solutions within a timeframe of 24 hours. The only catch here was that the solution required **machine learning** to be incorporated somewhere down the line, in order for it to be an eligible entry. The criteria on which individuals and teams were judged was the solution, its technical simplicity, completeness and the presentation of the solution itself. The panel of judges included the likes of industry experts such as Sankarson Banerjee, CTO, National Stock Exchange (NSE); Sumeet Vijaywargiya, Associate Director, **IBM Watson** and Karan Chaturvedi, Developer Advocate, IBM. The winners of NSE FutureTech 2018 Hackathon were The Matrix a team formed by Nikhil Lobo, Manish K., Subhnesh Kumar and Prashant; the 1st runner-ups were Silicon Alpha (Sanket Shah & Priyank Shah) and 2nd runner-ups were Drupple (Swastik Shrivastava, Anirudh Murali, Rajat Rawat, Shivam Singh & Rohan Chougule). The top three winners of the Hackathon received a cash prize worth Rs 1,00,000, Rs 50,000 and Rs 25,000 respectively along with an opportunity to intern at ICICI. NSE also partnered with The Garage, a start-up accelerator and co-working space in Mumbai where the winning teams could choose to work out from for up to a month. Speaking about the event, Sankarson Banerjee said, “With (this) Hackathon, our goal was to challenge young minds to solve present-day problems in a fun and pragmatic way and provide simple yet meaningful solutions using the latest machine learning tools.” Commenting on the platform itself, Rajan Navani, the managing director and CEO of JetSynthesys said, “NSE’s FutureTech Machine Learning Hackathon is a great platform for developers to put their abilities to test and showcase their technical knowledge in an exciting machine learning challenge."