Hack Infinity 2.0

Hack Infinity 2.0 was a 36-hour hackathon organized by Swadheenta DCEI at DA-IICT (Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology) in Gandhinagar. The event ran from February 7 to 9, 2020. I went with Souma Kanti Ghosh and Ujjwal Tiwari as team #include.

The theme was "Data-Driven Solutions." We built NewsFresh, a web application for detecting fake news and misinformation backed by a REST API. The idea was to package the model as something a company could plug into a pipeline to flag suspect content. Under the hood: a machine learning classifier trained on a labeled news dataset, a Flask backend exposing it as an HTTP endpoint, and a frontend to present the results. The project ended up in the projects section if you want to look at what we shipped.

36 hours is not a lot of time. We split the work across the model and API layer on one side and the frontend on the other. Mayank Pareek mentored us through the event. He helped us cut a few dead ends early, which probably saved us a couple of hours we would have wasted somewhere around midnight.

The final presentation covered the problem statement, the architecture, and a live demo. The demo worked. Given how much of the system was stitched together in the last four hours, that was not guaranteed.

We placed second and took home ₹15,000 (~$200). Not a big prize, but a nice way to start the year.

This was the first trip to Gujarat for all of us. Gandhinagar is a planned city, wider and quieter than most Indian cities I had been to. The DA-IICT campus reflects that, everything is laid out with room to breathe. The culture around the city, the food, the pace of it, was worth seeing beyond just the 36 hours we spent inside a lab.