Breaking barriers amidst the pandemic: hSenid Mobile hosts TADHack Sri Lanka 2020 virtually

The world’s largest telco application development hackathon – TADHack Global 2020 took place on 10-11 October where teams from 20+ cities in the world connected to hack overnight. Although the new normal demanded a virtual event this year, the ground-breaking end results did our island of ingenuity proud. hSenid Mobile, a main organiser of the Asia Hub, sponsored TADHack Sri Lanka 2020 powered by Ideamart APIs. 

The virtual event attracted over 100+ teams island-wide out of which, 20 teams were shortlisted to hack over the weekend. Unlike other times, it was great to recognise that many teams from Sri Lanka consisted women only teams - giving us an insight to the expansion of the community of women in STEM. It was also exciting to witness the participation of teams from a diverse range of cities around the island namely, Jaffna, Horana, Wadduwa, Panadura, Warakapola and Dharga town.

“One key positive outcome of the pandemic is that our virtual event enabled talent from all over the island showcase their potential at a global level by remotely joining from wherever they were in Sri Lanka,” said hSenid Mobile CEO Dinesh Saparamadu.

Local developers came up with exceptional solutions by pairing the API capabilities with a gamut of modern technologies erupting in the digital ecosystem such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), IoT and blockchain technology. These solutions were built to facilitate various needs of industries such as IT, transportation, education and healthcare. 

A total of eight teams were qualified for global judging to represent Sri Lanka at TADHack Global. Two teams were declared winners of the Asia-Pacific region and received a share of a $ 1,000 prize pot. The two winning teams were, 501 Implementing and Eureka Innovations. 501 Implementing (Arshad Aiyoob, Idrees Nafly, Izzath Mohammed, Shaakira Mubarak and Sidra Mowlana) developed a tracking system named COVID-Zero which is a virtual assistant alerting users with news updates via SMS, provides the closest locations to get a PCR test done, helps determine if one is asymptomatic or symptomatic and comes with an AI based call agent to assist callers. 

The only one-manned team from Sri Lanka – Eureka Innovations (Jittendran Jude Sajith) developed a Healthcare IoT plugin device that amplifies the capabilities of the the Hospital patient care monitors with predictive abilities to alert doctors upon detection of serious conditions.

Prior to global judging, a round of local judging was carried out by the judges: Roshni Hewamallika - Deputy General Manager (Core Business) at hSenid Mobile, Dushantha Ranwala – Tech Evangelist at Ideamart and Pasindu De Silva – Biz Lead at Ideamart, to determine the three best hacks of TADHack Sri Lanka. 

The Winner was team SKAT (Anjana Fredricks, Thineth Praptha Athukorala, Chalithya Sangeeth and Kasun Karunasekara) who developed a RFID Based Transport Ticketing System and received a prize sponsored by Ideamart. Team Eureka innovations (Jittendran Jude Sajith) secured 2nd place and Team Death Company (Vidura Dhananjaya, Kaveen Abeyrathna, Charith Bimsara and Kusal Siriwardena) secured 3rd place having developed a disaster alerting platform powered with contact tracing for COVID-19.

To make it feel no different from a physical hackathon, the organisers of TADHack Sri Lanka hosted an interactive session for all developers to take a break from coding and engage in an online trivia which was graced by Alan Quayle – the founder of TADHack and Jose Maria Recio – Director of Technology CosMo Software Consulting. The lucky winners of the trivia was team Death Company.

Founder of TADHack Global - Alan Quayle tweeted: “Excellent hacks! Nice to see that teams from Sri Lanka have used Global sponsor resources along with hSenid Mobile APIs.”