NSE Challenges Young Minds with a Machine Learning Hackathon at The Garage

The National Stock Exchange (NSE) partnered with The Garage, a San Francisco style start-up accelerator and co-working space in Mumbai, a business division of JetSynthesys, to host an exciting Machine Learning (M.L.) competition in India - NSE FutureTech 2018 Machine Learning Hackathon. This 30-hour live event held on March 17-18 challenged designers, coders and data scientists from across the country to tackle capital market challenges with machine learning.

Partnering with NSE for the first time, The Garage provided a 170-seater venue and also made available WiFi and beverages for the Hackathon. With pre-registrations of more than 400 developers, the event saw participation from more than 165 creative minds from technological and non-technological backgrounds who worked on real-life problems and attempted to develop a Machine Learning solution within a timeframe of 24-hours.

A panel of distinguished judges including industry experts like Mr. Sankarson Banerjee, CTO, National Stock Exchange (NSE), Mr. Sumeet Vijaywargiya, Associate Director, IBM Watson and Mr. Karan Chaturvedi, Developer Advocate, IBM decided the winners’ basis their skill set and problem-solving ability. The criteria on which individuals and teams were judged was the solution, its technical simplicity, completeness and presentation.

The top three winners of Hackathon received INR 1,00,000, INR. 50,000 and INR. 25,000 in cash, an opportunity to intern at ICICI, complimentary seating at The Garage, along with a bagful of goodies. The winners of NSE FutureTech 2018 Machine Learning Hackathon were The Matrix (Nikhil Lobo, Manish K., Subhnesh Kumar & Prashant), 1^st Runner Ups Silicon Alpha (Sanket Shah & Priyank Shah) and 2^nd Runner Ups Drupple (Swastik Shrivastava, Anirudh Murali, Rajat Rawat, Shivam Singh & Rohan Chougule).

Speaking about the event, Sankarson Banerjee, CTO, National Stock Exchange (NSE) said, “Machine Learning is making a profound impact in the technology space. It’s diverse ability to learn and adapt to its surroundings allows M.L. to perform at levels similar to or even beyond human capabilities. With 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. We were absolutely thrilled to see the turnout as well as the intelligent minds that are our future!”

Commenting on the same, Rajan Navani, Managing Director and CEO, 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 M.L. challenge. A one of its kind event, it gave bright young minds the opportunity to learn and compete with the best talent in India. We, at The Garage, are extremely glad to partner with a body like the NSE and foster new talent in the technological space.”