FIT team wins national inter-university hackathon

A team of third-year undergraduates from the Faculty of Information Technology secured first place at HackX 2026, the national inter-university hackathon held in Colombo last week. Competing against 42 teams from universities across the island, the four-member team — all reading for the BSc Hons in Information Technology — built a working prototype in under 36 hours.

Their winning entry, a low-bandwidth telemedicine triage assistant for rural clinics, impressed judges with both its technical depth and its careful attention to real deployment constraints. The system combines an on-device language model with a lightweight scheduling backend, and was tested against scenarios provided by practising clinicians during the event.

“This result reflects exactly what we hope our programmes produce — engineers who can move from problem to working system under pressure,” said the Dean, congratulating the team at a felicitation held at the Faculty. The team will represent Sri Lanka at the regional finals in Singapore this October, supported by the Faculty and INTECS.