The European Union delegation is organizing a hackathon for smart city applications at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), here from today.
The hackathon aims to encourage designing new applications that a smart city could offer its citizens, its elected officials or its technical and administrative services.
Organised by the EU team a series of tutorials is already underway in four Indian cities for developers of applications from 12th of February. The programme is being organized in cooperation with Indian and European partners under an EU funded project for India-EU cooperation in ICT standardisation.
European Union Ambassador to India, Tomasz Kozlowski said, "This initiative is just one example of how we are implementing the decision taken at the India-EU Summit held on 6 October 2017 to broaden EU-India’s cooperation on ICT standardisation.”
The tutorials (in Delhi - 12 February; Hyderabad -14 February; Bengaluru - 15 February and Chandigarh -19 February) and hackathon (in Bengaluru on 16th February) will familiarise Indian developers – especially from start-ups and academia - with emerging global standards for machine-to-machine communications (M2M) and the Internet of Things (IoT). These standards are being developed by the global standardisation initiative "oneM2M", with active participation of the European and Indian standards development organisations (ETSI and TSDSI), and counterparts from Japan, Korea, China and the USA.
While the tutorials will combine training and hands-on exercises, the hackathon will be a challenge to develop real applications – in a smart city context - based on an open source implementation of oneM2M.
An eminent jury consisting of Estonian Ambassador (Riho Kruuv), industrialists, professionals, local elected representatives and staff of EU Delegation, TSDSI, ETSI and IISc will evaluate the proposals, on the basis of the demonstration by the participants on the model of a smart city.
Winning team of the hackathon will get a trip to Estonia, supported jointly by the European Union and Estonia, to attend the Estonian flagship startup and technology event Latitude59. In addition, selected participating team(s) will get direct access to the final jury for the SAP Startup Studio cohort of 2018-19, commencing end of May 2019, and thus an opportunity to receive several months of mentoring at the SAP Startup Studio in Bangalore.
A team from Institut National des Sciences Appliquées de Toulouse (INSA Toulouse), led by Prof. Thierry Monteil, an Internet of Things specialist and active participant in ICT standardisation, will support the implementation of the tutorials and hackathon on the ground.
One may recall, EU-India ICT Standards Standardization Project was started in 2015 with an aim to promote closer alignment between India and Europe with regard to the production and use of ICT standards and to harmonise the exchange of statistical data, thereby facilitating trade, increasing interoperability and the ease of doing business for companies.