George Town, 30 October 2018 – UOW Malaysia KDU Penang University College’s very own Department of Computing students has achieved the second-runner up position in the Penang State inaugural 24 Hours Open Data Hackathon 2018 on the 29th and 30th September in Dewan Sri Pinang.

The four-men team, named Team Forta consisting of Sriram Ramasamy, Muhammad Lokman and Lim Teng Wei from UOW Malaysia KDU Penang and a teammate from Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM), Arshaad Mohiadeen, were announced as ther second runner-up in the competition and awarded a cash price of RM1,000 and a certificate by state secretary Dato’ Seri Farizan Darus on Oct 11 at the Seminar Kerajaan Digital 2018 held at TH Hotel Penang.

Each team will be given a problem to solve and will be judged on the uniqueness and originality of the solution, number of data sets used, and ability to solve the issue given by judges from Malaysian Administrative Modernisation and Management Planning Unit (MAMPU), Accelerator for Creative Analytics Technology (ACAT Penang STEM), and Malaysia Digital Economy Corporation (MDeC).

Team Fortra was given a conundrum relating to Rapid Penang bus issues, in which the timing of the buses’ arrivals is inaccurate. Team Fortra went up against 17 teams and 57 participants in the competition.

“The main problem for Rapid Penang buses is to coordinate the locations of the bus. Therefore, we proposed the idea of Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant and other solutions because it can provide us with the coordinates of locations with an interval of 30 seconds,” said Sriram.

“I was so happy when I got to know that our team was chosen as one of the top three. This is the fourth podium of the year for me. What a remarkable year,” said Sriram about his recent achievement.

“With our experience in previous hackathons, we decided to join this year’s competition which will help our state to solve public issues with technologies,” added Sriram.

For more information, call 04-2386368 or log in www.kdupg.edu.my.