Chennai: IIT Madras Pravartak Technologies Foundation organized a hackathon on emerging technologies on Sunday and Monday (13th and 14th August 2023) for students.The ‘IITM Pravartak Datathon 2023 Grand Challenge’ involved IIT Madras students competing with their peers on developing cutting-edge solutions to real-world problems. The event was held in Hybrid Mode. The top five teams were given cash prizes with certificates for all participants.Several IIT Madras pre-final year students undertook an optional virtual internship program on emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence / Machine Language, Data Science, Cybersecurity and Product Management, among other fields, between May and July 2023. The training sessions were conducted by IIT Madras Pravartak Technologies Foundation & their skilling partners in relevant technologies, followed by an industry expert mentored project.As part of this internship program, this hackathon on emerging technologies (Datathon) was conducted by GUVI, an IIT Madras-incubated start-up. The Datathon involved long hours of collaboration, creativity, and coding with IIT Madras from diverse Engineering branches coming together to address real-world challenges.During the prize distribution ceremony at the campus on Monday (14th August 2023), Prof. V. Kamakoti, Director, IIT Madras, said, “One of the important things that a non-core trainee helps the core is that today, every core subject has sufficient data that is being collected and requires visualization. This can be a very good augmentation to your core discipline. Today, there is a lot of necessity for this kind of augmentation in the core sector. We see it every day when we meet the industry representatives.”Prof. V. Kamakoti added, “There is a broad need for a digital twin or digital representation through which they can talk to clients and do some analysis. This Datathon will have led you (students) to take a physical system and give a data model for it. Down the line, we would like to have such types of competition as part of students’ internship where we train students for two months and conclude it with such types of competition. This will essentially enable students to get very good placements It can also help students in their research and we must do this on a yearly basis.”