One hundred sixty teams applied and competed for Trithon 2020, a 24 hours non-stop hackathon organized at Trident Academy of Technology, Bhubaneswar on 15th and 16th February 2020.
There were three rounds of evaluation and elimination. A 5-member team from Xavier School of Computer Science & Engineering (XCSE) won the hackathon as 1st Place Winners of the hackathon and got a cash prize of Rs. 50,000, in addition to the “glory.” The XCSE team consisted of Soumi Ghosh (Team Leader, 2nd year), Lokesh Dandia (2nd year), Dinesh Darshan (2nd year), Subham Subhamaya Satpathy (3rd year) and Subhashis Suara (1st year). The team’s name is “Return_One,” which is a punny reference to a programming function that returns “successful.” Our faculty member Dr. Rakesh Badoni was the SPOC (School Point of Contact) for the team.
The team designed a coding project that aims to detect fake news from social media channels, including the forwards in WhatsApp. Nowadays, fake news is being created and disseminated quickly through various social media platforms, primarily to provoke or incite agitation against individuals or groups of people by distorting or skewing facts, and often to influence or manipulate public opinion.
During the first evaluation, the team explained the concept and the methodologies to the jury members. In the second round of assessment, they executed and showed snippets of their code to the judges. The team designed a prototype for fake news detection that can perform validation of text, morphed images, and text extracted from images. This model is one of its kind to integrate all these features: It analyses content using machine learning techniques, natural language processing tools, and ELA (Error Level Analysis).
For the final round, the judges challenged them to build a UI (User Interface) to combine all the three functionalities under a single platform. Students came up with ideas on the spot and worked throughout the night. Finally, they presented two designs of their model, one with a WhatsApp bot, and the other was a simple Graphical User Interface using Python.
History was made; the XCSE team reigned supreme! As per the decision of the jury, Return_One was declared as the top WINNERS on 16th February 2020.The Trident Academy of Technology organized the hackathon successfully in a well-coordinated manner and included a motivational talk for the students on the 15th evening.
Reported by Prof. Priyadarsan Patra, with the help of the students and Dr. Badoni.