SEMICOLONS 2015
Semicolons 2015
from Persistent
Semicolons, a 24-hour hackathon organised by Persistent Systems, a Pune-based global software product
development and technology services company, has
witnessed tough and healthy competition among participating teams for achiving top honours and a historic
pot of Rs 10.8 lakh.
Dr. Anand Deshpande, Chairman,
Managing Director and CEO of
Persistent Systems has been the
driving force behind Persistent’s
journey to the profitable, with
more then 8,000+ employee as of 2014. Persistent
is a strong innovation company . Dr. Anand, a tech-
Optimus Goa Team has emerged as India winners fol-
nology visionary has approached his business goals
lowed by The Goenkars as India’s first runnerup and
strategically and thoughtfully, laying the founda-
Hyderabad Hawks as India’s second runnerup, while
tion for a sound, global company that takes care of
Appian Buckeyes emerged as US Winners for
its people and is successfully positioned to achieve
Semicolons 2015 for their solutions built under the
growth consistently.
theme of Enterprise Digital Transformation.
A total of 27 teams from eight centres in four nations have participated in the competition held with a twist.
In true IPL-style, team owners will pledge money and auction for programmers. The prize money will be
do-nated to charity organizations supported by the winning teams. The hackathon was held at Pune,
Nagpur, Goa, Bangalore, Hyderabad, France, Kaula Lampur and Ohio, on February 7 and 8, 2015.
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SEMICOLONS 2015
• How does it work?
According to organizers, team owners show their intent to own a Semicolons team by pledging some amount for
charity and declaring the charitable organization that they support. They are allotted points (the currency) based on
amount pledged and votes gathered. Programmers register their intent to get auctioned and be a part of the team.
Team owners select two icon players for their teams; these icon players are out of the bidding process. Team owners
then bid for registered players with available points. Goal is to select 6 programmers with available points. Every
team also gets two students, selected through a separate entrance test process.
With this, team size becomes 10 and these 10 programmers together come up with a problem statement based on a
theme and develop design and architecture of their solution/app. This solution/app is implemented during the 24
hours stretch, starting on a Saturday morning, continuing over the night and finishing by Sunday morning. The
amount contributed to charity by owners of the short listed teams forms one part of the prize money. Persistent
Foundation will add to this amount to form the total prize money. Prizes will be donated to the charity organization
supported by the winning teams.
• Optimus Goa: India Winners
They built a collaboration platform and app for social causes. Collaborating on crowdsourced social initiatives which
require tools/approval/procurement can be difficult. Many NGOs do not have tools to effectively leverage the participation of interested citizens in their social initiatives. Existing applications are restricted to only friends. They built a
platform that revolutionizes the way social Initiatives are created and driven, by being open to everyone. E.g. initiatives like beach cleaning and blood donation. With this, people can collaborate and
create/participate in events. On the other
hand, users can find the current events
being held in areas near them. The app
would also have a provision for people to
donate if they are unable to participate in
the event.
Team Members : Domnic Mendes, Xavier
Pinto, Vipindas Nambiar, Brian Sebastian,
Suraj Desai, Gaurav Parrikar, Nirav Thakkar,
Ajith Chettiparambil, Dattaraj Devane
Team Owner : Mritunjay Singh
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SEMICOLONS 2015
• Appian Buckeyes: US Winners
They built Drone-A-Charya, a drone based insurance adjuster based on survey and insurance assessment system that
can take aerial photos and integrate them into an insurance assessment BPM workflow.
Team Members : Angel Rangel Reyes, Santosh Kundlik, Omkar Kannav, Rohit Wagadre, Gopinath Reddigari,
Akshaya Naik
Team Owner : Rahul Dubey, Preetpal Singh, Venkat Sakruti, George Thomas, Pravin Tarde, Sanjay Karmarkar
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SEMICOLONS 2015
• The Goenkars: India’s first runnerup
The team has created a smart Risk Management solution driven by an intelligent and self-learning risk recommendation engine that looks into organization’s historical data and automatically recommends potential risks based on project type, size, lifecycle phase etc. Additionally the solution automatically recommends response strategies and
actions (that have worked in the past) and provides suggestions around probability of risk occurrence and impact.
Mitigation plans are automatically suggested as potential activities that can be accounted for in the overall project
planning pro-cess. Also, the application can proactively suggest any escalations that may be forthcoming by
extrapolating the risk indices and associated trends. Effective Risk Managers can be rewarded by integration with
organization’s rewards and recognition system. Ability to create risks from within the context of productivity
applications like Outlook and Lync can ensure real-time and quick entry of risks when in conversation with the
customer. Additionally, text from customer feedback form and emails can be analysed to identify sentiments and
automatically populate/suggest the risk register for the project.
Team Members : Omkar Prabhu, Yatin Dalvi, Amit Parrikar, Vinayak Bhomkar, Harsh Aghicha, Nitin Ayir, Keshav Kirtani,
Sujay Kenkre, Chaitan Chodankar
Team Owners : Satish Kenkre, Sanjay Joshi, Siddhesh Kurade, Pandurang Kamat, Girish Bharne
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SEMICOLONS 2015
• Hyderabad Hawks: India’s second runnerup
The team has built a patient care transformation system or PCT. It is a Health Care Risk Analytics and Intervention tool
that notifies critical health risks in advance to initiate preventive interventions, thereby helping in improving quality of
healthcare services, reducing patient future critical illness incidents, mortality rates, expenses & sharing risks, etc.
Team Members : Anil Gudla, Bhargavi Vadda, Bhanu Kancharla, Sahithi Peruri, Aditya Topalli, Abhaykumar Nelaturu,
Narasimhan Chenduru, Balaji Malemarpuram, Ranjeeth Cheena
Team Owners : Kishore Mangavalli, T Prabhakar Rao, Subrahmanyam BV
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