UNISYS

The UNISYS Innovation Program is a competition for engineering students across India to partake in, the program started back in 2009 and has become an event of massive proportions. In the 14th edition of the program there were more than 700 submissions from nearly 190 higher education institutions across India. “The program started with humble begins but now sees a 250% increase in submissions over the last year”. Sumedh Marwaha, the Managing Director and Regional Vice President at Unisys India, took to the stage to give the keynote address for the event. He said with absolute certainty that the program was “Designed to foster creativity” and that the aim of the Innovation Program is “bridging the gap between Academia and Industry.” He went on to explain the importance of giving students the chance of work in real world environments and give them the chance to see and understand what it means to be creating and innovating outside of the school setting.

The UNISYS Innovation Program is a 10 month program and aside from being a competition it also provides students with the space to learn and grow in a way they wouldn’t be able to while stuck in classrooms. The program provides students with webinars for students to help them understand the
industry and problems faced by working professionals, it also helped to equip them with new technology and information that would be useful to them in the creation and development process. The program allowed them to collaborate with industry leaders and held road shows in various areas of Bangalore.

2023 is the first time UNISYS has had 7 finalists, there where double the number of mentors assigned this year (164) and there was unanimous agreement that the crop of students this year was truly outstanding making it hard for even the vetted professionals of the industry to pick the final seven much less the top three.

Despite the difficult choice three winners were announced, two of which came from M.S. Ramaiah Institute of Technology. First place went to Hrishikesh K Haritas, Darshan Bankapure, Rahul K Vishal, Vineet H Sadarangi, led by faculty guide Dr. Meeradevi. The first prize project was that of Sleep Apnea Detection using Personal Iot Devices with Novel Privacy Persevered Federated Learning. The students shared that their aim with this project was to provide a first line of defence against the stealing of personal and private data by companies. These students want to balance machine learning models and protection of data. They state that they have “built a synergistic alliance of two existing workflows.” A common theme between the three winning teams is that all three have a very personal relation to the problems they’re trying to solve, the reason why they have focused on Sleep Apnea is because one of the boys has a close relative with the disorder. Sleep apnea is something that is easily solvable if not for the technical limitations. This project they have developed helps detect Sleep Apnea in people using their machine learning model while keeping data and information private and safe. The team uses Iot, Cloud Computing, Machine Learning and Web3 to offer a privacy focused framework.

Second place went to the team from Dayananda Sagar University for their project Breast Cancer Detection Using Quantum Machine Learning and Deep Learning. The team consists of Snavya Sai M B, Sindhu S, Varsha Premanand and they were led by faculty guide Veena M. The students say that they had the interest in Quantum from the beginning itself due to their professor having her own deep interest in it. They go onto say that the reason they chose Breast Cancer is because they have seen friends and families of friends who have suffered from Breast Cancer due to it not being identified fast enough and enough after identification and treatment still succumbing to the illness. They say that their aim was to develop a program that would help them identify and detect Breast Cancer early enough to be able to deal with it correctly and safely. The students have explained that Quantum is the “latest emerging technology.” They also say that due to the large processing power and high computational speed and addressing large data sets. They compares classical machine learning versus quantum machine learning but also admitted that during all of their terrific work they were met with issues due to funding and not having access to actual quantum computers and therefore used simulators created by IBM. The project uses Quantum machine learning to diagnose breast cancer and classify patients according to their symptoms.

The third place prize goes to M S Ramaiah Institute of Technology for their project Privacy Preserving Machine Learning Computation using zkSNARKs. The team includes Rohin Joshi. Rohan A J, Dhruv Dange, Sharath R Maiya and they were led by faculty guide Sanjay H.A. When talking to the team they talk very personally about keeping user data private, they shared that the fact that their phones seemingly listening in to their conversations worries them and they feel as though keeping data private should be a huge concern and priority for all. They told us that they have created a model where a person does not have to share their private data and the company can encrypt their model and send it over to the concerned party for computations. They aim for this app to be employed in sectors like “healthcare and finance where data privacy is important.” The team says that they are planning on researching and developing this further and hope to even launch it as a product.

Aside from these three obviously brilliant teams four other qualifiers were also invited to showcase their projects and be judged by a panelist of judges based on feasibility, viability, originalist, sustainability and technical approach. The event proved to be one bejeweled with some of the brightest young minds of our country all using their intelligence to keep their fellow man protected and to advance the existence of our society beyond what exists in today’s time. Here at ENN we congratulate the winners along with the other four qualifiers for their brilliant projects and their thorough knowledge of the world they create in.

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