Honeywell hosted their first Honeywell Hackathon Challenge on June 9 in Bengaluru, India along with HackerEarth. The first in a series of similar events scheduled for this year, The Honeywell Hackathon Challenge was held at Honeywell Technology Solutions’ office with more than 2,000 participants. The Honeywell Hackathon Challenge is designed to stimulate creativity and innovation on technologies that are defining our increasingly connected world. The first Hackathon ideated on Chatbots, Augmented Reality/Virtual Reality, Predictive Analytics, Image Recognition, Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, and Real-Time Location Sensing / GPS.
The 169 entries were evaluated based on the innovativeness of the idea, its relevance as a solution to the problem, and the maturity of technology employed. Twenty-two shortlisted teams comprising 41 contestants then participated in the day-long offline Hackathon held at the Honeywell Bengaluru campus. The winners were Lezwon Castellino, Jaison Chacko and Rahul Acharya, students at Christ University, Bangalore, whose application was a Self-Driving Artificial Intelligence. The Honeywell Hackathon Challenge saw 1,200 students from the prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), Regional Engineering Colleges, and school children from across the country submit their ideas. 
Lezwon said “We have participated in other Hackathons before but were truly inspired by the caliber of solutions designed by other teams at this event. It was great to meet and talk with the engineering and development teams at Honeywell. We deeply appreciate the steer and mentoring we got from Honeywell to optimize our solution.”
Gaurang Bharti, a student of Oakridge International School, whose idea made it to the final shortlist, was among the youngest participants. “Our idea was appraised by professionals. We received feedback on improving the idea for mass use. This is a very rare opportunity and a great learning exercise”, said Bharti.
Dr. Akshay Bellare, vice president and general manager of Honeywell Technology Solutions, India, Honeywell’s technology development and engineering arm, said: “I’m delighted to see the thirst for learning among such a young group of technology enthusiasts. As Honeywell transforms into a software industrial company, with about half of our 23,000 global engineers working on software, we recognize that digital and physical solutions will become more and more connected to change the way we live and work. We are committed to nurturing Indian engineering talent and supporting the tech community in making it more robust and in-step with the latest technology trends.”
Honeywell will hold two more Hackathon Challenge events in the coming months to enable the developer community to innovate and ideate on focus areas consuming the technology world today. Stay tuned for more news and updates, follow us on Twitter for the latest update.
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