Hyderabad, January 28, 2028…..: AI Hackday, a mega AI hackathon, was conducted this weekend as the first round towards kickstarting a series to build people-centric AI development. With participation from 20+ colleges, 60+ faculty members, 100+ industry mentors nurtured 600+ teams with 2000+ students working on projects. This is organised by viswam.ai, a center setup at IIIT Hyderabad by IIITH and swecha.org.
The AI Hackathon is a 3-stage series fostering innovation and creativity, culminating AI Days 2025′ Spark Camp, where 100 production-ready AI applications are developed to address India’s unique challenges. Inaugurating the hackathon, Bhavesh Mishra, IAS, highlighted the need to leverage the AI revolution early, citing the success of non-Western models like DeepSeek LLM, and emphasised on how India can also build its own context-driven AI models.
The hackathon emphasizes using AI to solve real-world problems, bridging societal gaps, and fostering a more inclusive, tech-driven future. AI based audio tools, story generation and image AI were among the many prototypes built.
Other speakers and super mentors included Prof Ramesh Loganathan (IIIT Hyderabad), Chaitanya Chokkareddy (Co-founder and CTO of Ozonetel), Kiran Chandra (Head of Viswam.AI), and Pradeep Kumar Jilagam from Micron Technology.
AI HackDay is part of a broader initiative including the one Lakh internship program to encourage students to engage with communities, compile culture-specific data sets, to train Indic language models in various dialects, emphasizing localized AI solutions that reflect cultural and linguistic nuances. This initiative in the process is working towards building deep AI skills, at scale.