Gurugram: It was the summer of 2007, when septuagenarian Harish Chandra Jain of Alwar (Rajasthan) decided to gift a computer to his grandson! Nobody knew that the then Class-VII student of Alwar Public School would add many feathers to the cap of his engineering college one day.
The third-year B. Tech (Computer Science) student Pranav Jain of The NorthCap University represented India at prestigious Ultrahack, held at Helsinki (Finland).
Besides being selected for Ultrahack, a global three day Hackathon with a goal to bring the developers, startups and corporations together for solving world-class challenges with the latest technologies, Pranav was also invited there to Slush conference – one of the Europe’s largest technological event. At Ultrahack, Pranav shared an idea to create a platform where people/patients can register for clinical trials, which appears beneficial to pharmaceuticals companies in future. Incidentally, he was also authorized to conduct Ultrahack in India. He has been invited to attend the Ultrahack which would be held again in Finland in April 2017. He has also been assigned to bring the winners of the Hackathon (which he would conduct in India) to the Ultrahack which would be held in April 2017.
Son of Ayurvedic medicine manufacturer Alok Jain and home-maker Shikha Jain, computer science is more than passion for Pranav. He had won accolades on several occasions for his adroit and apt academics. He was selected for the Google Summer of Code (GSoC), a three-month summer programming internship, with a stipend of Rs 4 lakh or $6,000 for the project. It was aimed at adding to the functionality of making voice calls through web-based email service providers. Not only that, he had won Google for India US Hackathon, which was felicitated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and was also a part of a daylong Innovation Hackathon in Rashtrapati Bhawan, besides been selected to Jagriti Yatra 2016 with as well for which he had also received a 50 percent scholarship from The NorthCap University.
Pranav is also working on a Google project, under the guidance of a mentor from the United Kingdom. “I am working from India. Google got in touch with me through a couple of experts and also assigned an expert to help me with the project. We have daily assignments and projects via Skype,” he said.
Inspired by the Hollywood movie ‘Iron Man’, and created a system similar to the one in the film to control the electronics in his room, Pranav said that he wanted to develop a system to solve the problems that people face in their day to day life. He had also created s system by which he can control the lights and fan in his room using voice recognition commands on his mobile phone.