Smart City Living Lab at IIIT-H Launches Back to Campus Tech Challenge

• Winning Startups/Teams will get a paid POC opportunity in the smart campus at IIIT-H.
• Smart City Living Lab at IIITH is launching “Back to campus Tech challenge”, a unique platform for the private and public sector to discover digital capabilities to help campuses stay nimble during trying times.
• It is envisioned to scout for those innovations and to bring the private and public sector together with research facilities to work on the post covid challenges.
• Startups/Teams will also be able to showcase the solutions to IT park chiefs, facility managers, education institutions and other corporations invited.

Hyderabad, 22 October 2021: With vaccinations and a general easing of the pandemic, people, employees and students will soon return back to campuses. Smart City Living Lab at IIITH launched “Back to campus startup challenge”, a unique platform for the private and public sector to discover digital capabilities to help campuses stay nimble during trying times. This back-to-campus safety & security technologies challenge is envisioned to scout for those innovations and to bring the private and public sector together with research facilities to work on the post covid challenges.

“In these post covid times, giving students the confidence to come back to campus is critical. Thus, deploying solutions which ensure a safe and secure environment and demonstrating their efficiency in a live campus would be the right approach. This challenge aims to give participants a platform to ideate, build and test their solutions”, says Anuradha Vattem, Lead Architect – Smart City Living Lab.

The focus areas for the challenge are but not limited to testing and screening for people on campus, automatic cleaning and sanitation, crowd control/monitoring  (people, vehicles, queue/ social distancing), remote temperature/health monitoring, air quality to prevent infection(mitigation of covid aerosols on campuses), social distancing and contactless solutions for commerce. Startups/teams working on the above-mentioned areas in the post prototype stage can apply. Startups meeting the above criteria may apply here: https://smartcityresearch.iiit.ac.in/challenge03.html before 3 November 2021.

The Smart City Living Lab commenced operations in Dec 2020. The Smart Campus setup along with the  data lake for live sensors data is underway. Lab has been organising multiple roundtables and innovation challenges in the areas of water quality & quantity measurement, smart city/building solutions, post pandemic solutions etc. in association with smart cities, govts and corporate partners.  Startups identified during the challenges and the problem statements identified during the roundtables are being incubated and supported through the Living Lab to develop/improve solutions and get access to markets.

Smart City Living Lab, an open-innovation ecosystem has been set up at IIITH,with support from MEITY (Government of India), Smart City Mission and Government of Telangana and the corporate founding partners like Silicon Labs & Intel. In IIITH, the campus is being transformed into a platform for learning, research, experimentation and for showcasing new ideas and approaches through the concept of Smart City Living Lab. By connecting startups with those searching for smart city solutions, the program will amplify the transformation of city infrastructure.