Nikhil Agarwal, a 3rd-year iMTech student had plans to visit a place this summer but little did he knew that his participation in a hackathon would win him a trip to Paris! Yes, Nikhil will be traveling to Aivancity in Paris to attend a 15-day summer school. Seemingly delighted Nikhil shares his experience of participating in the recently held AI in Fashion and Design Hackathon.
IIIT Bangalore hosted and co-sponsored AI in Fashion and Design Hackathon, jointly with the Institut Français en Inde and the French Embassy in India.
The Hackathon conducted at IIIT Bangalore on 2nd and 3rd April encouraged students across disciplines to work on projects that demonstrated the successful application of AI in several facets of fashion and design. Students from Design, Textile Engineering, Information Technology and Management Schools from India and France hunched over their laptops for a marathon of coding and worked together to solve the current problems towards a sustainable fashion and design industry.
By the end of the second day, the winning team that comprised Nikhil developed, “Samuday (Community)”, a market intelligence platform for artisans. The platform will provide artisans with all the market intelligence on trends, patterns, silhouettes, etc. both local and global so that they can keep themselves updated and have a direct interface with customers. A quarterly magazine both electronic and print versions will be provided to artisans on a subscription model which will reduce their dependency on intermediaries and get direct access to all data. AI methods will provide trend forecasts that’ll help them in planning and building their craft accordingly.
“Understanding problems from fashion designers and conveying my engineering expertise to them was a bit challenging. Finally, we were delighted that we could help them with the technologies and we came up with Samuday. The judges were pleased with the platform. It was an overwhelming experience that gave me a lot of learning experience too. The hackathon was really not about winning prizes; It is about playing with awesome technology. You will gain more practical knowledge in a hackathon,” he sums up.
The other members from the winning team are Rhea Rajesh from Strate School of Design, Anushka Vijaywargi from IICD, Samruddhi Godbole from SMI and Shruti Kumar from LISAA.
