Need Of The Hour? Delhi Students Develop Application That Measures Air Quality Index, Win US Award For It

Students from India have won the prestigious Marconi Society award reported the Times of India. The team, consisting of three students- Tanmay Srivastava, Kanishk Jeet and Prerna Khanna developed a mobile application which uses images captured on a smartphone camera to analyse the quality of air in one's neighbourhood.

According to the official release issued by the Marconi Society Mountain View, the Bharati Vidyapeeth College of Engineering students claimed the first spot in a contest organised in India by the Celestini Program. Marconi Society (named after a hill in Italy where Guglielmo Marconi conducted his first wireless transmission experiments) supports the program.

The society is run by winners of the Society's annual Young Scholar Awards, who collaborate work with technical undergraduate students in developing countries. The goal is to create social and economic transformation in communities by using technology, the release said.

The team won $1,500 for their successful effort in developing the ‘Air Cognizer’- an affordable, portable and real-time air quality analytics application. The application enables users to analyse the air by uploading the image captured. Users need to capture an image outdoors, with half of the image covering the sky. The Android application is available at Google Play in the name of Air Cognizer.

"Using image processing techniques, features are extracted and the machine learning model estimates the Air Quality Index (AQI) levels for the user's location. The machine learning model is deployed on smartphones using Tensorflow Lite and Machine Learning (ML) Kit from Google," the release said.

Divyam Madaan and Radhika Dua, from UIET Chandigarh, Punjab University won the second prize for creating a website that can forecast air pollution levels in Delhi over the next day. It predicts the major pollutant and its causes by using various advanced machine learning techniques such as Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM).