A group of students had developed innovative solutions to simplify document retrieval at a hackathon organised by the Sustainable Living Lab (SL2) in partnership with Intel India. The hackathon was conducted as part of the Tamil Nadu Skill Development Corporation’s (TNSDC) Naan Mudhalvan programme.

Priyanka M., a student of Jaya Institute of Technology, said: “Once a document is uploaded, our artificial intelligence (AI) automatically reads and understands the content. If it is a scanned document, OCR technology extracts the text. After extracting the information, the system indexes the document so that it can be searched instantly in the future.” Her teammates included Naveen Pandian N, Yuvaraj S, Priyadharshini C. (all from Jaya Engineering College) and Keerthana M. from Jaya Institute of Technology.

A team called Non Fungible Minds built and deployed an AI system that watches live traffic cameras, predicts congestion before it happens, and automatically adjusts signal timings — running entirely on edge hardware at the intersection level across Chennai’s busiest roads.

Another team, comprising Bhavana Shree J. and Ganesh K., both third-year students from Sriram Engineering College, came up with Nalam AI. It is an AI-powered healthcare and disease prediction platform developed to support early detection and prevention of disease outbreaks.

By analysing health, environmental, and location-based data, it identifies disease risk patterns and potential hotspot areas. The platform provides symptom checking, health recommendations, and outbreak monitoring to assist both citizens and healthcare authorities.

Nalam AI aims to promote preventive healthcare, improve public health awareness, and enable faster, data-driven responses to emerging health challenges in communities.