By Express News Service BENGALURU: For years, the traditional ‘missing person’ poster has been used to enlist the people’s help. Now, social media platforms have come as a boon. More sophisticated is the facial recognition. And police are turning to hackathons to find better ways to help people. The ‘India Police Hackathon 2019,’ which began on Saturday, is the first such event being organised by the Karnataka police. Suman Gupta, an MTech student of the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), is using deep learning techniques to develop coding solutions for facial recognition — one of the problem statements given to the participants at the Hackathon. Speaking to The New Sunday Express, Suman said that the coding that she is working at will help the police track missing persons as well as criminals. “Deep Learning helps in re-creating images. So if a person has gone missing, he or she can be tracked using the coding that we are trying to develop,” said Suman. Deep Learning is an emerging area of machine learning research. One of its key objectives is to move closer to Artificial Intelligence (AI). The Hackathon is being co-hosted by the RV College of Engineering (RVCE). The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers is the knowledge partner. ADGP Sanjay Sahay, Police Computer Wing, Government of Karnataka, said 45 teams were shortlisted. “We are trying to get talent from all around the country. By coding for police, we are coding for India, which is the motto of this Hackathon,” he said. The 45 teams are from Delhi, Chennai, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka. The coding competition has five problem statements for which the participants have to develop coding solutions. These are facial recognition, Ministry of Road Transport and Highways data analysis, unified communication App for the police department, centralised standard beat management solution and connecting online presence for open source Intelligence. Amit B K of Reva University, a participant, has to develop a Unified Communication App for the police Department.“We are trying to develop a unified App, which can be used to communicate critical command messages from a unit officer like the district superintendent of police to his colleagues and subordinates. He can get real time updates on work done and the impact,” said Amit. Sapna Tewari, Joint Director, Subsidiary Intelligence Bureau, said that the Hackathon was being hosted by the Ministry of Home Affairs. “It is a platform to exchange ideas. The outcome will be shared at the DGPs’ conference on December 6. The police department needs to catch up with the latest technological advancements and such interactions are extremely important to provide the police with innovative ideas for a better security infrastructure,” Tewari said. Rama Subramaniam, Chief Strategy Mentor of ‘Turbostart’, asked the Hackathon programmers to upload their startup ideas to their national team to avail up to Rs 2 crore funding and assistance from Turbostart. Yatheendranath T J, in-charge of the IEEE Computer Society operations in India, said 57% of schedule overruns are because of lack of proper designs by software engineers.One of the tasks that the programmers had to do was to analyse and find patterns from the data of accidents that have happened across India this year. The programmers have to design proper navigation bars, which would help identify the danger zones or the places, which were most accidents prone. “This would help the police in preventing road accidents,” said a programmer. “Till now we were working in silos. The hackathon has opened the field for a much wanted co-ordination among the academia, industry and the police, who are the service providers,” said Divyanshu Verma of Intel.

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