This is how you make a spot in top 8 out of 700 teams -AB InBev Maverick 1st Runners up from IIT Madras

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Maverick, a hackathon organized by AB InBev, the world's largest brewery wrapped up their competition successfully on June 26, 2020. It saw a bevy of thinkers, doers, and changemakers who with their sharp wit and discriminating skills worked like a perfectly oiled machine even during the virtual mode of operations. 

It cannot be gainsaid that this Belgian multinational drink and brewing company offered a unique opportunity for young coders to impact the business world and leave behind an indelible mark. Here is one such experience of the first runners-up of the hackathon from IIT Madras. So contain your excitement and read what the team Data Brewers have to say about their journey in the AB InBev Maverick hackathon.

The nub of the hackathon

A total of 8 teams out of around 700 teams from 5 IITs made it to the finale. As the competition had three different problem statements, it wasn't easy to compete with teams from various problem statements, as the products' results came as separate domains. Hence, the success evaluation metric was pretty complicated.

It was a 2-month long competition, and we worked on the problem of invoice data extraction. We implemented state-of-the-art text recognition technologies for extracting the invoice data and believe that the process of transformation of text data to a structured invoice format was the challenge here.

Setting forth to learn and brush our skills

We strongly believe that AB InBev's and Unstop's organization skills were excellent, and there is no doubt in the quality of judgment as we had 'the best' panel during presentations, which guided us through the pathway to knowing how the products can be enhanced to improve the business more efficiently.

We as a team learnt the importance of structured thinking, product management, productionization of services during our journey in AB InBev Maverick.

And a twist of fate

We cannot forget the time when we lost our complete source code the day before round 2 submissions. It was a silly mistake that deleted our source code from the machine, leaving us with no backup. We were pretty scared at that point, though we fastened our belts and completed a coding streak of straight 8 hrs, rewriting the whole code again, reproducing 100 percent results. Fortunately, we successfully presented our working prototype on the day of the presentation.

The squad behind the success

We are a group of data science enthusiasts at IIT Madras, working on interesting AI problems. Pranav comes from the data science background and handled the development side of the project, while Avichal and Shubham had Business and Finance expertise, and they worked on product development and business model. It's always been an exciting experience of working in a team. It's like a knowledge-sharing platform. And fortunately, we never ran into any conflicts.

All in all, AB InBev Maverick was a memorable experience!