Pandemic, Paranoia, and Possibility
IIT Guwahati hosted the 9th edition of the Inter IIT tech meet event virtually from 26th to 28th March 2021. With over 1200 participants from over 23 IITs, it is a battle between the students for the championship title. Filled with the vision for the future driven by hope and technology, the team focused the theme of this year's event towards tackling the issue during a pandemic.
The events were categorized based on the amount of preparation required to solve the corresponding problem statement. Organizers conducted eleven events under the three categories high-prep, mid-prep, and low-prep. Due to the online nature of the event, all the problem statements were simulation-related problems.
"Due to the pandemic, the team had initially planned to go ahead with just six problem statements. In the end, we had about eleven problem statements with the inclusion of some new domains," says Monish Kumar - an overall coordinator of the tech meet.
One major issue with the virtual mode was that the team had foreseen how they would solve the issue with the evaluation. The organizers had to come up with an entirely new method to assess the solutions. The assessment is conducted in two stages; first, the judges studied the code's feasibility; second, the judges evaluated the teams based on the knowledge and the solution's scope for practical applications.
The team collected generous monetary sponsorship, which allowed us to refine the problem statements to create feasible time-bound problems, says Monish Kumar. DRDO, ISRO, Bosch, Quaninsti, Drishtee, Bridgei2i, Jaguar, and The Product Folks sponsored the Tech Meet 9.0
Speaking of highlights of the meet, Yogesh Yadav and Monish Kumar, overall coordinators of the Tech Meet, mentioned that the theme, which focused on pandemic problems through its innovative problem statements, to be the first highlight.
They also said the event to be a massive success although being online. The speakers also attributed its success to some of the novel ideas and new events they had incorporated into the tech meet. It includes introducing and implementing a new grading system, introducing three unique events that were never a part of the tech meet, and finally, the auction, which is a fun event.
Aditya Mehndiratta, a participant in three tech meet events and the ex-club secretary of IITG.ai, says, "Future tech events should incorporate Cross-disciplinary topics like the ML in cybersecurity or reinforcement learning in robotics or cryptocurrencies, though technologically changing this is where the future lies."
"We organized some new events to induct finance, electronics, and automobile clubs into the Tech meet for the first time," says Monish. He also says that there's a good chance that more events are likely to be incorporated in the upcoming editions.
The biggest drawback of the event going online was the reduced networking among participants. "Independent slack groups for each problem helped mitigate the problem to some extent", says Aditya. Organizers feel that new events like the Tech meet auction would have been more fun had the event gone offline and acted as great icebreakers.
IIT Kanpur bagged this year's general championship and has taken its tally to four wins out of the tech meet's nine editions. IIT Bombay and IIT Kharagpur finished in second and third place, respectively.