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April 17 And the winner is...........A big congratulations to IT Sligo, who were the overall Irish Imagine Cup winning team at last Thursday's competion with their innovative entry: PARK IT. Their system focussed on CO2 emissions. The team comprising of Kieran Stafford, Vladimir Mabhena and Chrisitna Luminea built a real-time parking system that films car parks, sending the data of vacant parking spaces to a central database that is then pushed out via a mobile text/sat-nav to drivers. In essence, it's aim is to reduce the congestion and pollution of cars needlessly driving around looking for somewhere to park. The bottom line on this savvy creation, is that is prevents unnecessary circulation trips, where a driver goes around and around looking for parking (all sounds way too familiar
Also in our other 8 online competitions for Imagine cup 2008, a team from NUI Maynooth Acid Rain are through to the last 200 in round 2 of the embedded development challenge and there are 6 teams (3 from University Ulster Coleraine, 2 from IT Sligo and 1 from Dublin IT) through to the last 100 of the Games development challenge.
Best of luck to all - and congrats to all of the finalists - the entries were truly inspirational, and a great example of the Technical Talent coming through our colleges here.
The Recruitment Team April 10 Irish students proving they have GREAT "Imagination"
Sorry for the blog silence over the last few weeks - but getting back on track now and there are some pretty exciting times here for Microsoft that we just had to write about
 Currently our Imagine Cup initiative is well under way! Last year was the first year that we hosted the Imagine Cup in Ireland, and our Irish champions from NUI Maynooth travelled to South Korea where they competed against students from all over the world, achieving 6th place overall. This ensured they were included on our global Innovation Accelerator program in Silicon Valley, working to making their Sign-Language software product becomes a reality....truly every young entrepreneur's dream!
The competition is open to Technical students, where in each year it challenges students based on a different theme. This year the very topical challenge is to “imagine a world where technology enables a sustainable environment.”
The final of this year’s Irish Imagine Cup are taking place this week with students from across the country competing for a place in the global finals in France this Summer.....over 520 students registered for the Irish Imagine Cup competition - a 250% increase on last year. Our top 12 teams have been selected for the software design final representing University Ulster Coleraine, IT Sligo, NUI Maynooth (2 Teams), Dundalk IT, IT Carlow, IADT Dunlaoghaire (2 Teams), IT Tallaght, IT Blanchardstown, Griffith College and Dublin IT.
The submissions are mainly focussed on environmental sustainability and range from ideas on a game to teach children about recycling, through to tracking energy consumption in the home, simulating electricity through wind energy, reviewing regional climate scenarios, real-time parking information to save energy and using online mapping to assist in car-pooling. Our students are using a wide variety of MS technologies to support their solutions from the .NET framework, Visual Studio 2008, Silverlight, ASP.NET, XNA, SQL Server 2008, Windows Server 2008, Windows mobile technology, Live meeting, Virtual Earth, to name a few.
Best of luck to all of the teams, and stay tuned over the next week or so for the results from the Irish Jury! |
) This system is flexible enough to work anywhere from a car-park to a street or even a field! It can also be used for all types of vehicles eg. boat in a harbour. IT Sligo will soon be bound for France for the finals of the competition, so fingers crossed that they are sucessful all the way.|
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