M# Hackathon Experience

Oct 28, 2023

3 min read

When we got to know about the hackathon problem statements, we immediately started brainstorming about various PSs. We knew we had to pick a problem statement that complimented with the diverse skillset of our team. We had two members for ML, two for Web and one primarily for app (These roles are flexible and they need to be to make sure to adapt to the changing requirements of the project during the hackathon).

After going through all the problem statements, we finalized a problem statement related to mental illness onset detection in a college target group. We came up with a elaborate plan and system design which almost included everything that could possibly be put into it (except blockchain, though we got a feedback during the later stage as to why did we not integrate it).

Mindful AI System Design

We then proceeded to make a fabulous PPT with all the buzz words to make it feel innovative. This got us selected in the top 30 teams that qualified to the offline hackathon at MIT Manipal.

Day 1

I didn’t do much on day one. Two members were working on the ML part of our hack which needed a lot a big data pre processing and a lot a training time since they were trying to build a custom ml model. The app guy was busy setting up auth for the application and me along with my web member were making a dashboard kind of thing for the admin. I picked up off the shelf ui components (shadcn, tailwind) to quickly get something beautiful as in hackathon like these it’s all about how good your UI/UX is.

Day 2

Had to finish firebase AUTH integration and making the backend to handle video upload and passing it through the ML models built by then. It was tricky to work with flask as backend tech since it was my first time and using it was a requirement since the ML model dependecies are all in python.

Day 3

This day as well I didn’t do much as majority of work was done by my teammates. I would always advice you to pick good teammates who are accountable and whose vibe matches with you and clashes are bound to happen and this will help your team to hold together.

I had a lot of fun joking around and playing TT and carrom. Sleep shouldn’t be your priority since here the main issue for not sleeping would be surprising. The whole place was confined and had a centralised AC. Everytime we tried to sleep someone would always bring down the temperate. this left us sleepless for days which is a common occuring in hackathons.

Results

At the end we managed to bag a consolation and a spot in the top nine teams with our cool hack.

Here’s what we built, if your interested - https://github.com/Shubham-Rasal/Mindful-AI