BIT Mesra is all set to host its first ever hackathon “HACK-A-BIT” from October 26 to October 28. The organising team is leaving no stones unturned to make this venture a grand success. A total of 54 teams have been selected for the grand finale to be held on the campus after an online screening. For the evaluation of such aspiring and innovative ideas and their final products, the selection of judges has been completed.

Durga Vishwanatha Gadiraju, the founder of ITVersity LLC, through which he has trained thousands of students in big data and related tools like Hadoop and Spark, is in the panel of judges along with Kaushik MLN and Pratyush Agarwal.

Gadiraju has trained himself in the fields of database and big data which enabled him to move through an array of roles in those domains, including a stint at IBM as a database architect. He has had 14 years of IT experience for clients like IBM, Walmart, Citi, AT&T and ERCOT, and also specialises in application development, Cloud and DevOps, and data warehousing.

Kaushik MLN is currently the head of engineering at ITVersity, a digital learning platform created by none other than the first panelist, Gadiraju. He is the co-founder of Zup, a digital payments start-up, and Z2P, a start-up based on mobile based P2P lending. He is also the co-founder of RuddBuddy. Kaushik specialises in web and mobile application development and big data.

Pratyush Agarwal is the co-founder of CodeAsylums which aims to help students crack technical interviews and help them develop products using the latest technologies and practices in the software industry.

He is an experienced freelancer and has also worked in companies like DE Shaw. He specialises in the domain of big data, blockchain and FinTech, which will surely help the participants trying to deploy their projects using these technologies.