UK Students Tackle Tough Problems to Win UK Imagine Cup 2009 Software Design Challenge
Kings College to represent the U.K. at worldwide Imagine Cup finals in Cairo, Egypt.
Cambridge - UK - 19 May 2009 - Microsoft has announced the 2009 UK winners of its annual Imagine Cup Software Design Challenge, at an event held in conjunction with Microsoft Research Cambridge. The competition saw seven student teams, selected from over 3000 entrants from across the UK contend for a chance to represent the UK at the worldwide finals in Cairo, Egypt, in July.
The winning team, TKCL, from Kings College London submitted Pioneer, an application to address traffic pollution in cities. Pioneer is a GPS route optimising solution that takes in to account existing traffic load to provide congestion-sensitive travel plans, as well as a management infrastructure for calculating and updating navigation routes. “Ultimately, the data generated from the use of Pioneer could be used to inform city and road planning to provide long-term congestion relief” said creators Iulian Nitescu and Christian Bruggemann.
Team TKCL was also awarded the HPC prize for the most innovative use of Windows HPC Server in their project. “Route calculation can be very processor intensive particularly when taking into account live data from millions of users. Our algorithm is optimised to take advantage of HPC Server to allow us to provide fast and accurate routing”.
Second place was awarded to Vision Creative from Reading University, and third place to TravelPrint from Aberystwyth University.
Now in its seventh year, Imagine Cup continues to encourage students around the globe to imagine a better world in which people are empowered by technology created by the students’ talent and innovation. The United Nations has identified some of the hardest challenges in the world today in its Millennium Development Goals - ranging from halving extreme poverty and halting the spread of HIV/AIDS to providing universal primary education. Microsoft is calling on young programmers, artists and technologists to rise to this challenge: “Imagine a world where technology helps solve the toughest problems facing us today.”
"We would like to recognise all of the students who entered year’s Imagine Cup UK Software Design competition. They have envisaged and created software applications that demonstrate the power of technology in solving real-world problems”, said Dr Andrew Sithers, Academic Initiative Lead at Microsoft UK. “It’s always pleasing to see the high level of skill and dedication that goes in to creating these entries, and we wish the winners the best of luck at the in Cairo”.
More information on the Imagine Cup is available online at http://www.imaginecup.com.
More information on the United Nations Millennium Development Goals can be found online at http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/.
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