Six first-year students from the Colleges of Arts & 麻豆视频 and Engineering and the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science came away with top honors for their agricultural innovation idea to address India鈥檚 pollution problem during the Digital Agriculture Hackathon Feb. 16-18.
鈥淭he Freshmen,鈥 as they cleverly named themselves, entered the hackathon knowing they wanted to find a solution to a real-world problem, but their idea of using rice straw as a substrate for growing mushrooms literally 鈥渕ushroomed鈥 during the weekend-long event.
鈥淲e came to the hackathon not to find a solution, but to find a problem that鈥檚 worth finding a solution for,鈥 said Sai Nellutia 鈥27. 鈥淭hat was our biggest motivation. We wanted to solve a societal issue. Air pollution is causing 16,200 deaths every year, just in the city of New Delhi.鈥
The hackathon was sponsored by the Cornell Institute for Digital Agriculture (CIDA) and Entrepreneurship at Cornell. More than 120 students took part in the event in Schurman Hall in the Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine.
鈥淎ll of these students are part of this movement of the transformation and revolution of digital agriculture,鈥 said Renata Ivanek PhD '08, professor at the College of Veterinary Medicine and co-director of CIDA.
鈥淚f anyone watched the presentations today, whether the students were computer scientists, or from agriculture, or veterinary medicine or biology, there was a common goal, an ambitious goal of feeding the planet,鈥 said Jos茅 F. Mart铆nez, the Lee Teng-hui Professor and senior associate dean for diversity & academic affairs in the
College of Engineering 鈥淭hat鈥檚 the kind of thinking that makes institutions like this one different from anywhere else.鈥
Students formed teams on Monday and Thursday before the hackathon, then began meeting in person Friday night with a kickoff event. Saturday included work sessions and chats with the 40+ mentors, as well as time preparing pitches. Teams gave pitches Sunday morning and winners took part in a final pitch round Sunday afternoon before winners were announced.
Students from Penn State, the University of Connecticut and Vin University in Vietnam also attended the hackathon and many placed in finalist teams.
Nellutia and Rohan Sonakya 鈥27 of 鈥淭he Freshmen鈥 led their pitch presentation with a video they took from travels to India, showing the level of air pollution they encountered. A major cause is the burning of rice straw. Team members discovered during their weekend research that after rice grains are harvested from Indian fields, nearly 80 percent of rice straw, 6.5 million tons, is burnt rather than composted because burning is cheaper for farmers.
鈥淲e couldn鈥檛 even drive, there was too much smoke,鈥 Sonakya said.
Team members 鈥 Anthony Paredes-Bautista 鈥27, Sai Nellutia 鈥27, Vansh Bherwal 鈥27, Nihaal Konda 鈥27, Rohan Sonakya 鈥27 and Nick Channg 鈥27鈥 said they will use the $3,000 prize to continue working on the idea.
When the team of friends entered the hack on Friday night, they weren鈥檛 sure of their idea and thought they would build a web application 鈥 they鈥檙e all computer science (CS) majors.
Their company, , would give farmers knowledge, subsidies and mycelium to grow and sell rice-straw mushrooms with crop residue. The team found that the solution has already proven successful in Vietnam, the Philippines and Cambodia.
Although they are CS majors, some members of the team have had some business experience. Bherwal said he and Nutella met before Cornell at a DECA Inc. competition, an organization that sponsors clubs in high schools and colleges to encourage entrepreneurship and business skills.
鈥淥ur best strategy was asking for help from the mentors,鈥 Bherwal said. 鈥淎t first it was intimidating, these people would come into our room and ask us what we were working on, but we realized they were there to help us grow our ideas.鈥
鈥淲e shifted from what we were comfortable with, with our technical experience, into a business model,鈥 Konda said. 鈥淎nd that experience of venturing out of our comfort zone was invaluable.鈥
Other team winners at the hackathon were:
Most market ready: Fem 5 team of Lauren Meyer DVM 鈥26, Danielle Falcon MBA 鈥24, Bhavishya Agarwal MENG 鈥24, Yaa Acahampong MENG 鈥24, Angelique Jan Miane MENG 鈥24
Best data-driven solution: Bonsai team of Jonathan Moon MS 鈥24, Jhalak Sahay 鈥25, Srikanth Karaikal PhD 鈥27, Kushal Kumar Digavinti MS 鈥24, David Han 鈥25, Yirtai Liu
First place, One Health challenge: Tiger Team of Shreyas Sunil MENG 鈥24, Ariba Akber MENG 鈥24, Aritra Das MENG 鈥24, Sai Vishnu Bolisetty MENG 鈥24, Aqsa Iqbal MPH 鈥25, Kathryn Gaddie MPH 鈥25
First place, Circular Agrifood Systems and Economy challenge : Beefy Bugs team of Izzy Giacobe 鈥26, Ngoc Nguyen 鈥26, Nathan Preuss PhD 鈥27, Karim Dergal 鈥25, Adeniyi Fagbewesa 鈥24
This hackathon was one of four hosted this academic year by Entrepreneurship at Cornell. The next one is March 8-10 in New York City and is focused on patient safety in healthcare. Find more hackathon information on the .
.
More News from A&S
