APOGEE 2015

The Beginning

It was late night on Wednesday, 25th March 2015 when everyone except Rahul Majethia sir and me, refused to go to one of the biggest tech fests in India, the BITS APOGEE. We both didn’t want to miss this opportunity in any case and started to prepare for the IBM Hackathon and other events of the fest. It was the third night when I had not slept and I wasn’t fortunate enough to sleep for the upcoming nights too.
I don’t know what happened in the night, but on Thursday afternoon four more people were ready to accompany us to the fest. Now that’s gonna be fun!

We left at 5 in the evening and boarded the bus for Pilani at 10PM from Anand Vihar. The bumpy road and my proclivity to sit at the rearmost seat, didn’t allow me to sleep again. Sighs. But I had a whale of a time with my own thoughts, gazing at the beautiful starry sky and enjoying the early spring breeze. At 4 in the morning, we reached Bits Pilani and registered for the fest.

10 minutes later we all were dozing in the common room. The next day was going to be a long day (literally!).

NOTE: I promise I don’t click such selfies. It was just to show you guys the room. :D

Day 1:

The sun was newly raised and the sky looked as if it was stretching and yawning, preparing to brighten up and start the day. The Java guys (Rahul Sir and Saketh) were participating in Smash the bug and the rest of us were trying to find a suitable event. We decided that we can participate in Speed Scrabble but unfortunately no one turned up at the event site. Not even the organizers. Maybe the event got cancelled.

After eating the MESS food at the KG mess(Manasa wanted to tell everyone that KG stands for Krishna Gandhi Mess), we all participated in Gambling Math. It was a weird event, in which you are awarded random scores for the random questions your choose out of the given set. When the event got over we had a delicious lunch at the connaught. In the evening we went to attend the Think Again Conclave where some of the biggest speakers are invited. We were fortunate enough to attend the talks of Walter Bender (Former Director, MIT Media Lab) and David J. Peterson (Linguist, Creator of Dothraki).

Sorry for the poor quality picture. This was the best I could capture from my phone in dim light from such a far distance.

It was now 10pm! Time for the paramount event of the trip! IBM Hackathon. We had to build an application using the IBM Bluemix platform in next 12 hours. After a few hours of the introduction of the platform we agreed on building an application called BluHealth. The application would crowd source the Carbon Dioxide and Monoxide levels using the information from various sensor of your phone. It would then give you a warning if the levels exceed a certain limit. Next few hours, we slogged our guts out. The event was supposed to end up at 10 am but we were still working on the application at 4pm(Yep, that’s 18 hours later).

The other team from our university was working on a very innovative idea as a part of Hackathon. They were using the speech to text api to convert the lectures of the faculty to text. Then using the IBM watson api they were trying to convert the text in concise lecture notes form which could be distributed to all the students. They made lot of progress on this mind blowing idea during the hackathon.

Below are some of the images of us doing the last minute work.

When the event was over, we decided to eat at the Food King. And Boy, they served the most appetizing food I had eaten in weeks. We visited the Birla temple, took an hour’s nap and prepared to leave.

When we were checking out, we were accused of stealing 5 mattresses. NOTE TO BITS: Yes, we carried your 5 mattresses in our backpacks and we are thoroughly enjoying your comfy mattresses. Thank you again! We left the campus and took one final leaving selfie.

Note: I, Vijay Nandwani, solemnly swear that I am not hooked on to taking selfies. I had to do the job because most of the other people weren’t interested in capturing pictures and even if they were, they(Saketh) were busy with capturing my water bottle or laptop! -_-

Hmm, we missed the bus! So we had to spend one more night in the Bits Campus and it was decided that we would leave on the early morning tomorrow. We went on a binge at the night canteen with Paneer Butter Masala, Butter Naan, Maggi, Ras Malai, Rasgullas and few more things.

The bus journey next day was awesome and we had a great time!!

We were welcomed in the university with an ebullient weather.

The trip was not only all beer and skittles but also enlightening. We realized our strengths and weaknesses and were determined to work on them from the next day itself.

Ciao!