Chennai: The Centre of Excellence for Road Safety (CoERS) at IIT Madras organised its first-ever international hackathon on road safety recently. Students, engineers and researchers from Bangladesh, Bhutan, Myanmar, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Thailand took part in the hackathon.The participants developed AI-powered chatbot solutions across three problem statements: Drivelegal, which provides road users with location-specific information on traffic laws, violations and fine schedules; Roadwatch, which enables citizens to report road infrastructure issues and track accountability for their resolution; and RoadSoS, which offers location-based access to trauma centres, ambulance services and emergency contacts following road accidents.In a release, IIT-M said this region (BIMSTEC) is home to 1.8 billion people and records 2 lakh road fatalities every year. Data-driven and technology-enabled solutions are required to strengthen road safety across the region.“Road safety cannot be solved by any single intervention. It requires a systems approach, where infrastructure, technology, behaviour, and policy work together,” said professor Venkatesh Balasubramanian, head, CoERS.“The same can be extended to our neighbours as they can adapt what we have learnt in India and we can also learn from their experiences and approaches,” he added.The top three teams were from India. Team ‘Cipher’ secured the first position, ‘Civics Forge’ came second, and ‘Tejas’ won the third position. Together, they were awarded a total prize pool of ₹1 lakh, along with opportunities to further collaborate with CoERS.In recognition of outstanding innovations from across the wider BIMSTEC region, Road Legal (Thailand) and Qreators (Nepal) received special appreciation for their work.
