The winners of the eighth annual Imagine Cup Worldwide Finals were announced at the Opera House and National Theatre (Teatr Narodowy) in Warsaw, Poland, where more than 400 students gathered to celebrate their unique innovations aimed at solving the world's toughest problems.
This year's Imagine Cup, sponsored by Microsoft Corp, began with a field of more than 325,000 high school and university students representing more than 100 countries and regions and culminated with a weeklong celebration in Warsaw. During the week, students demonstrated their real-world solutions and competed for cash prizes totaling $240,000 (U.S.) across five competition categories and six awards.
Team Skeek from Thailand took home the grand prize of $25,000 (U.S.) in the Software Design category for their solution eyeFeel, which allows hearing-impaired people to communicate with others via an augmented-reality environment. It combines speech and face recognition, converts it to English from text, and generates virtual conversation text balloons and sign language animation in real time.
Students care deeply about their projects having an impact. This year's projects primarily focused on solving challenges in education, healthcare and the environment. Within those, a few trends emerged among the students' projects that spoke to specific global issues. For example, a number of projects used social networking to address carbon emissions caused by vehicle traffic, several teams created alert systems to help people quickly access local emergency services, and a plethora of solutions were designed to help the visually and hearing impaired communicate more effectively.
The following is a list of the top three winners in each of the five competition categories. Cash prizes, totaling $150,000 (U.S.), were awarded to winners across the five competition categories.
Software Design
First Place: Thailand, Skeek
Second Place: Serbia, TFZR Team
Third Place: New Zealand, OneBeep
Embedded Development
First Place: Taiwan, SmarterME
Second Place: Russia, MCPU
Third Place: France, GERAS
Game Design
First Place: Philippines, By Implication
Second Place: Belgium, NomNom Productions
Third Place: France, Gears Studio
IT Challenge
First Place: China, WeiQiu Wen
Second Place: Bolivia, Miklos Cari Sivila
Third Place: Singapore, Zhengbin Hu
Digital Media
First Place: Taiwan, Mirror Vita
Second Place: Saudi Arabia, Dreaming Spirits
Third Place: Singapore, Woolgathering
More information about Imagine Cup 2011 can be found here. Students can begin registration for next year's competition today.
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