Bhargav Golla Apogee Coordinator, CSA
The Computer Science Association (CSA), with around fifty members, hosts a number of guest lectures, quizzes and coding contests throughout the year, and is noted for its highly innovative projects during APOGEE. Wondering what they were panning for this APOGEE, we, at the EPC, caught up the Apogee Co-ordinator, Bhargav Golla. Here’s a bit of what transpired…
Could you give us a brief overview of the events you’re planning this APOGEE?
We have nine events this time, out of which two are pre-apogee, online events. One is Qrious, an online riddle cum quizzing event, and the other is C.O.D.E.R. Among the events taking place during APOGEE, there are Codestorm, Smash the Bug (A Java debugging contest), Mindsweeper- a tougher model of Minesweeper, and Cyberfiesta (a software designing competition). In addition to these, there is Hackathon, an on-campus event in which participants may code in various languages to implement an innovative idea based on a given problem statement.
How many projects do you have this time?
We had sixty abstracts, out of which one and twenty have been selected, and twenty are in the pitching process. There are a lot of eye-catching projects this year.
What about projects by first year students?
There aren’t many. A few of them proposed ideas but most of them got eliminated during the selection process. First years generally don’t do it by themselves as they lack the technical knowledge required.
Is there anything else you’d like to say?
People don’t appreciate APOGEE as much as they should. I think they should participate more actively. And this year’s will probably be better than the previous ones.
Some Projects to look out for:
Of the numerous projects, two seem very promising.
One of them, Kinectik, allows the user to reconstruct indoor 3D surfaces in real-time, with real life textures. It tracks the user’s head, the direction of gaze and the skeleton and apparently, can be used to project a shirt of the proper size on the user!
Another involves genetic modeling using Markov chains and is a mathematical model of the random walk methodology adopted by Genetic Algorithms (GA). This may help generate statistically meaningful data regarding the behavior of apparently random events.
CSA sure looks like it has a lot on its plate! Let’s wish them luck because they might just need it.
