R. V. College of Engineering students win Special Award at Microsoft Imagine Cup 2018

NEW DELHI, JULY 26: Team DrugSafe from India has won a special award under Big Data category with a prize money of $15,000 at the 2018 Microsoft Imagine Cup world championship at Redmond, USA. The Indian students team was one of the three student teams representing India at the Imagine Cup 2018 global finals.

With DrugSafe, Chidroop I, Pratik Mohapatra, and Srihari HS from R. V. College of Engineering, Bengaluru aim to address the growing global issue of counterfeit drugs by helping people verify the authenticity of medicines.

The team encountered the issue of fake medicines when one of their friends showed no signs of recovery after weeks of taking a prescribed medication. Learning that nearly half of all medicines sold in India were fake, they decided to create an app that could authenticate medicines and trace them back to their source.

The app uses Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to identify minute details in the design and packaging of medicines and compare them to the original manufacturer’s patented and trademarked attributes. After three levels of checks, discrepancies are flagged to help users identify medicines as counterfeit. Machine learning and AI-aided statistical analysis also help identify a potential epidemic outbreak in a region. The team designed a simple User Interface (UI) for the app so that it could be used by anyone regardless of age or technical skill and have the widest possible impact.

The team plans to utilize the prize money to seek new partnerships and integrate more Azure services into the app to make it more powerful.

Team smartARM of Canada emerged as the world champion of Imagine Cup 2018 with their robotic prosthetic hand that calculates appropriate grip for objects utlilizing Microsoft Azure Machine Learning and Computer Vision. More details available in the release attached.