10k non-engineering students participate in TCS hackathon

Country's largest IT services company TCS on Thursday said that it has hosted a hackathon which saw the participation of 10,000 students from non-engineering backgrounds. The participants from diverse disciplines like arts, commerce, nursing, agriculture, criminology and law used artificial intelligence-based voice commands to come up with solutions in under two hours even though they do not know coding, as per an official statement. The hackathon removes barriers of language, technical training, and prior coding exposure by providing structured, multilingual AI assistance, enabling participants to move from problem identification to a working app in a single session, it said. ''You don't need a computer science degree to build software, just curiosity and AI. This hackathon gives students from any background the chance to build something real, in their own language, and walk away knowing they can do this,'' the company's vice president and head of AI practice, Ashok Krish, said. The hackathons were conducted across 22 colleges in 10 states over the last six weeks, the statement said. Hackathons were held in Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Assam, Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh, Delhi, Andhra Pradesh, and Maharashtra. As a next step of such satellite editions of the hackathons, the company is bringing together nearly 2,000 students who will upskill themselves at the 'Tata Bharat Yuvai Hackathon' at the India AI Summit. The flagship event will serve as a platform to showcase prototypes to industry leaders, delegates and dignitaries, the statement said. TCS said the initiative addresses a vast and underserved segment of India's talent pool, pointing out that 62 per cent of the undergraduate population studies Arts, Science, and Commerce, and only 10-12 per cent of Indians are fluent in English.