Time to imagine
06 July 2010
Many students in the Imagine Cup World Finals in Poland are bringing projects already deployed.
When a catastrophic earthquake struck Haiti earlier this year, rescue teams around the world started to mobilise. One group preparing to head to the devastated country was Hand for Help, a humanitarian organisation based in the Czech Republic.
Before leaving for Haiti, Hand for Help received a call from three students at the nearby Brno University of Technology. The students proposed that the group use a new mapping software programme that they had built to compete in the Imagine Cup competition.
The emergency responders took the programme and used it to stay connected as they travelled across Haiti’s rough terrain. The Geographical Information Assistant (GINA) allowed the rescue workers to use their PDAs to overlay emergency locations on multiple maps, pull global positioning system co-ordinates for the places they needed to go, and use touch technology to make notations on their maps.
Today, Hand for Help is still in Haiti, using GINA to help build a field hospital outside Port-au-Prince and navigate roads and rugged terrain throughout the country.
Meanwhile, the students behind GINA are preparing to represent the Czech Republic at the Imagine Cup World Finals in Warsaw, Poland. The Microsoft-sponsored student technology competition, the world’s largest, concludes this week as teams from around the world compete for the top prize. As part of a growing trend in the Imagine Cup competition, the Czech students and others competing in this year's event are entering projects that are already helping to solve problems around the world.
For its part, the GINA team hopes to use the competition as a way to get its project recognised by rescue workers worldwide. Before the Haitian earthquake, GINA had just been another school project to help people track each other on a map, but then they realised that GINA could help people in need.
“The best result for us is that our software helps rescue workers save lives,” says Zybnek Poulicek. “It seems like a fairy tale sometimes. We have big plans to make GINA very successful.”
Jon Perera, General Manager of Education Strategy for Microsoft, comments that the students competing in Poland are ‘the best of the best’ in terms of student innovators, and it should not be surprising that many of them are already making an impact in the real world. “We believe that students are some of the leading innovators in the world, and if we can unleash the creativity of students, we will see amazing invention and innovation in the marketplace. As the industry leader, we believe it's part of our job and our mission to unleash the creativity and students.”
Flags from Algeria to the Netherlands to Vietnam waved in the shadow of Poland’s Palace of Culture on 3 July for the official opening of the Microsoft-sponsored student technology competition that is now in it’s eighth year. The Imagine Cup unleashes student creativity on some of the world’s biggest problems. This year, the 325,000 high school, college and university students who entered the competition were asked to tackle the challenges outlined in the United Nations' Millennium Development Goals. The 400 finalists who made it to Warsaw had to beat rivals in regional and national events around the world over the past few months.
“At Microsoft, we believe in the potential for technology to make an impact on the world’s toughest challenges,” states Perera. “We sponsor the Imagine Cup to inspire students to combine technology and their creative energy to create projects that have a positive impact on the world. To do well at the Imagine Cup, it’s not just about great software,” he says. “Instead, students need to think about how to bring their innovation to market. You can’t underestimate what these students are doing – these are sophisticated applications designed to be successful in the real world.”
Jordan’s Imagine Cup entry is another example of a project being used in the real world. Their Project Oasys aims to monitor and help solve ‘desertification’, a worldwide problem that affects some two billion people, according to the United Nations. The project has caught the interest of their country’s Ministry of Environment, which is using Oasys to collect information on at-risk land.
The team sees the threat that desertification brings every day. “If you drive around Jordan, it’s everywhere,” says Yousef Wadi, a student at German Jordanian University. “You see green land, and then all of sudden the desert is right there, crawling onto the green.” Apparently, the biggest challenge is detecting lands that are on the verge of degrading to desert. Oasys acts as an early warning system that can inform environmentalists, governments, and communities when to take action. Threatened lands are monitored by small sensors imbedded in the ground that send environmental data via satellite to an online database, where artificial intelligence software will analyse the data and predict future changes to the land.
“Where desertification and drought increase, child mortality doubles,” says Wadi. “When lands turn into desert, you can’t plant food anymore. So if we tackle one environmental problem, we can help a lot of other issues.”
The image shows GINA Team Czech Republic students (from left to right) Zbynek Poulicek, Boris Prochazka, and Petra Bacikova demonstrating their Geographical Information Assistant (GINA), which helps rescue workers co-ordinate with each other and navigate difficult terrain.
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