Engineering students from the Amritapuri campus Varun Ramani, Amreth C., Ajith and Aravind R. placed first among all colleges in Kerala and sixth among all colleges in India in the 2008 Great Mind Challenge Contest. The contest saw participation from over 15000 teams from all over India. The Amrita students designed and built an Online Crime Reporting System. Christened IRIS v1.0, their system was based on the J2EE platform.
“We worked on the project from July 2008 on,” they shared. They received much guidance from their mentor, Mr. Vipin Pavithran. “We used IBM’s Rational Software Architect, Websphere Application Server and open source frameworks like Struts and Hibernate. The system had many features such as tracking crime reports through SMS, fingerprint matching for criminals, identity checking and FIR generation.”
The system also provided for localization of the site in Indian languages. “The system can enable the police to be more proactive in addressing day-to-day complaints of citizens. Also in reducing red tape and making the essential processes online and easily accessible.”
So will their system be actually used?
“IBM helps implement the top five projects nation-wide. In addition, the top twenty projects are put on the internet to be used without charge by end users. The end users include government agencies, solution providers and academia.”
“Since ours ranked among the top 20 in the nation, there are good chances of the system being noted and actually used by those it was designed for. We will also explore other ways to see if there is interest in deploying this system.”
Launched in 2004, the Great Mind Challenge is a national-level contest open to students of engineering, MCA and other IT related courses. “We’re in our fifth year now and have grown steadily over the years,” the contest website states. “This year, we aim to reach 1800 colleges and over 1 lakh students.”
Through this initiative, IBM works with college students, seeking also to promote its own technologies that embrace open standards. It is a win-win situation. They get students to work on real-time problems and scenarios using IBM open source software. The students, in turn, gain an opportunity to improve their software development skills.
The Amrita team was awarded iPod Touch and Digital Cameras. We congratulate them on this achievement.
February 28, 2009
School of Engineering, Amritapuri
