To curb cyber-crime across the jurisdiction by updating the innovative technical assistance, the Chhattisgarh Police department in association with International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT) Naya Raipur has organised an one-week-long cybersecurity hackathon ‘HackManthan’ focusing on tracing crypto-currency-based transactions, upgradation footage from CCTV cameras for policing, filtering and speech emotion of emergency calls through Dial 112 and Analysis of crime data.
The event was graced by eminent personalities DGP Ashok Juneja, Prof. Rajat Moona, Director at IIT Bhilai, Prof. Ram Kumar Kakani, Director at IIM Raipur, Pradeep Kumar Sinha, Director at IIIT Naya Raipur and ADG Pradeep Gupta.
At the award ceremony, DGP Ashok Juneja commended the participants for their creative presentation and innovative ideas. He spoke about the importance of modernizing the tools of the police force and the involvement of young minds in the process. Juneja congratulated the top three winners and all the finalists.
He said that Chhattisgarh Police is always eager to collaborate with IT institutions and budding IT experts. Shri Pradeep Gupta, ADG(Technical Services) welcomed the guests and stated that with increasing cybercrime, IT solutions have become the need of the hour. He mentioned that this is the first-ever hackathon event being organized by Chhattisgarh Police and the first-ever long-standing collaboration of the Police Department with a premier national IT institution.
Prof. Rajat Moona, Director at IIT Bhilai, addressing the young minds, stated that the best police organizations understand technology. He spoke about how Policing was done from a data collection perspective earlier; He stated that data has immense power and is the new oil. Organizations that could foresee the potential of data are World leaders today.
Director of IIM Prof. Ram Kumar Kakani highlighted the importance of interaction between policymakers, policy implementers, and academia. He appreciated the enthusiasm of participating students and stated that this participation is a significant contribution towards strengthening the policing in the country.
Dr. Pradeep Kumar Sinha, Director at IIIT Naya Raipur, addressed the gathering and expressed happiness at being approached by the police and posing their trust in their capabilities. He also talked about the importance of taking up real problems and exposing students and academics to real-life situations.
Hack Manthan was a cybersecurity hackathon held as a joint venture between CG Police and IIIT Naya Raipur, with an aim to inculcate interest in students regarding cybersecurity, data analysis, and development, keeping the responsibilities of the modern police force in mind. Participants entered teams of up to 3 members and proposed solutions for a total of 5 tracks comprising various problem statements.
The problems ranged from blockchain analysis to image and speech recognition and were codified considering the mainstream issues like cybercrime, data theft, scam calls, DDOS attacks, hateful remarks on social media, etc. Over 460+ teams registered, totaling over 790+ participants. A total of 12 teams were shortlisted for the final live presentation.
The judging panel, composed of dignitaries from CG Police and various educational institutions, judged the solutions precisely in terms of real-life usability, scalability, practicality, and the effort made to implement the solution. The winning project was Third Eye from the Netaji Subhas University of Technology Delhi, which presented a solution based on live crime tracking from CCTV surveillance. They were awarded a prize of Rs. 80,000. They developed a decentralized and distributed security protocol, which also stored the past and present location of the vehicle for 30 days and then used that data to train their ML model further.
Challenging other competitors, Tatparya, featuring an unlikely collaboration between a law student and an engineering student, ranked second with their problem addressing sentiment analysis social media, and was congratulated with a prize of Rs. 40,000. They presented an interface with an extensive report of a person's posting habits, common hashtags used and a 6-degree analysis of toxicity obscenity and threatening language
The second runner-up, Vaak Bhavna from IIIT-NR, won Rs. 20,000 with their solution for call analysis to emergency services. Their projects will greatly help the IT Cell of the police department and serve as prototypes for further exploration in the region. The event concluded with a vote of thanks and was hailed as a rousing success for a flagship cybersecurity hackathon.