NITK Surathkal Students Win National First Prize in Bharat AI-SoC Student Challenge

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Mangaluru : A three-member team of fourth-semester B.Tech. students from the Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering at the National Institute of Technology Karnataka (NITK), Surathkal, has clinched the first prize in the prestigious national-level Bharat AI-SoC Student Challenge. The winning team, comprising Shresh Parti, Rushil Jain, and Sriprahlad Mukunthan, developed their project under the expert mentorship of Prof. Suman David from the ECE department. This highly competitive hackathon was jointly organized by industry leader ARM, the Chip to Startup Programme of the Ministry of Electronics & IT (MeitY), Government of India, and IIT Delhi.

The NITK team secured the top spot in the specific category of “Touchless HCI for Media Control Using Hand Gestures on NVIDIA Jetson Nano.” Their innovative project focused on creating a touchless Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) system capable of translating real-time hand gestures into precise media control commands, such as play, pause, and volume adjustments, specifically tailored for the VLC Media Player. To achieve this, the brilliant students utilized Google’s MediaPipe framework for accurate hand landmark detection, successfully classified both static and dynamic gestures, and seamlessly mapped them to keyboard shortcuts using Python programming libraries.

The intensive five-week virtual challenge was designed to bridge the gap between academia and industry by fostering project-based learning in cutting-edge Artificial Intelligence and System-on-Chip (SoC) technologies. Highlighting the scale of their achievement, NITK’s innovation emerged victorious in its category after competing against a massive pool of 340 project submissions from institutions across the country, where only the top six teams in each category were shortlisted for the final evaluation.

At the official award ceremony celebrated on May 14, 2026, at the ARM Labs in Bangalore, the triumphant students were honored with a grand cash prize of ₹1,00,000 and merit certificates. In addition to the accolade, the young engineers gained invaluable industry exposure by touring the state-of-the-art ARM labs and interacting directly with leading chip designers. Prof. B. Ravi, the Director of NITK Surathkal, expressed immense pride in the students’ outstanding performance and commended them for bringing commendable national recognition to the institute.