The team InbuiltMinds comprising Saran Kumar Pantangi, Aditya Sethia, Diptangshu Chakrabarty, Vamsikrishna Patchava and Balaji SR took away the winner’s award at the recently concluded Capgemini Tech Challenge 3.0. The third edition of the technology contest by Capgemini was held at Capgemini Knowledge Park in Airoli, Mumbai. The team won the Tech Challenge Title for the penultimate challenge called the ‘Digital Shopper’.

Analytics India Magazine interacted with one of the participants, Balaji SR who happens to be an alumnus of Great Lake’s first PGP-BABI batch in Chennai. Based out of Hyderabad, he first came to know about the Tech Challenge through Google Ads.

Commenting on his participation he said that “Capgemini Tech Challenge was open to both IT professionals and Students all over the country ageing between 18 to 35. It received a good response from over 74000 participants. Each Challenge had three levels with level three as final challenge. Contest was held on various themes like Coding, Pega, Hybris, Adobe, Block Chain, Data Science and Data Integration.”

[pullquote]“The first two levels were held online and the third level was a two-day live Hackathon at Capgemini Knowledge Park, Mumbai. There was also a team based digital challenge. I had competed in Data science theme. I am the winner in Individual Data Science Category and part of the team which had won digital challenge”, he exhilarated.[/pullquote]

Receiving a humongous response, there were over five lakh page visits and 4.8 million views on the Tech Challenge microsite. However, only sixty participants from across the country attended the finals in Mumbai.

The penultimate tech challenge titled the `Digital Shopper’ comprised of a team event where eight different teams brainstormed and used their technology expertise to create solutions to real-life consumer challenges. It required participants to create a solution to a complex problem, which would allow a shopper to research multiple categories of the same product, compare price indexes, and identify a cost-effective product, all of it through a unified solution. Balaji used the tool R to go about the challenge.

A data professional with an experience in data warehousing and business intelligence, Balaji saw this opportunity as a platform to benchmark himself against best the Data Science professionals in the Country. He confessed “Great Lakes PGP-BABI was my gateway to Data Science. I have an exposure right from Data extraction to predictive Analytics, thanks to the Great Lakes’ program”. He further added “I need not prepare much for the competition as I had already gone through the grind when I did my PGP-BABI program at Great Lakes.”

On a concluding remark Balaji said that his major takeaway from the competition is satisfaction and confidence of being one of the best Data Scientists of the country someday.

One should have strong fundamentals- is his advice to other aspirants. “Data Science is not about running some tools on the data. It is about filling the gap from Data to Decisions. In addition to technical capability one should be good in business understanding. I am good in technology and was lucky to pick up good business understanding from Great Lakes PGP-BABI program”, he said.

The jury comprised key members from Capgemini India leadership. Winners and runners up in every theme received cash prizes of up to Rs 30,000 and Rs 20,000 respectively.