Imagine Cup '08: Microsoft seeks talent
On Friday, the Russian Imagine Cup final was held at the DK of the Moscow Aviation Institute, which has been organized by Microsoft for the fifth year with the support of Intel and many other companies at the international and local levels. High school students, undergraduates and graduate students for a year competed in qualifying rounds in one of several categories, including a competition of software projects and competitions to create artificial intelligence and algorithms for solving a specific problem.
Software projects (Software Design) - the main category of competition. Within its framework, teams create software to implement some of their ideas that fit into the theme of the competition, which changes annually. This year it was the “Environment”. In the final, teams from Moscow, St. Petersburg, Nizhny Novgorod, Volgograd, Chelyabinsk and Tomsk presented their works. At the decisive stage of the competition, they got through the qualifying stages in the regions that were held in the tenth of March. First place in the Russian final gives the winning team the right to a Microsoft-paid trip to Paris, where this year the international final is held.
Last year, a team from MAI with its Mapedia program became the winner in the category. In last year's Cup capital, Seoul, she managed to reach the semifinals. This year the national team Ignition from St. Petersburg, representing three universities (ITMO, St. Petersburg State University, LETI) and the Research Institute of Forestry, had the honor to represent Russia this year. Their project, codenamed Arina, is a “decision support system for fighting forest fires”. The names of the characters: Anatoly Nikitin, Roman Belov, Daria Elkina and the leader of the project, Yuri Z. Shur.
Simply put, Arina is a program that calculates optimal fire extinguishing methods based on terrain features, meteorological conditions, forest cover type, and many other parameters. These parameters are taken into account in the mathematical model developed at the Research Institute of Physical Chemistry on the basis of the methods used abroad and own experience. The model is refined by experimental data that have accumulated a great many over the years of observation of fires. The system has already been tested on real (almost random) fires and showed almost complete coincidence of the calculated predictions of it with reality. Work on improving it will continue.
The honorable second place was taken by the .Life team from the Nizhny Novgorod State University with a program for calculating pollutants from human activity. The three-dimensional visualizer allows you to manually drag a “smoky” object (for example, a factory) across the locality and observe the change in the state diagram of the biosphere in its vicinity.
Third place went to the team MSTU. Bauman and MIPT ecopatrol with their project of detecting the harmful effects of man through remote-controlled helicopters.
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“Besides the fact that it’s just interesting, the guys from St. Petersburg have now won almost a million rubles - a paid trip to Paris with a stay in a luxury hotel in the city center,” says Igor Lizunov, a member of the h7 team from Chelyabinsk, who represented our country at the international the final of the competition in another category - " Project Hoshi ". The task of the participants of this competition, traditionally - to save the world. Conventionally, it can be represented as the creation of artificial intelligence, which will manage the army of robots in the likeness of a strategic game. On the map of the area, which may be the human body or the vicinity of Lake Baikal, the robots of the two teams fight each other, achieving goals and hindering their achievement by the enemy.
Having passed the qualifying rounds in the regions, the finalists pass the draw and compete according to the Olympic system in a separate room, far from the noisy presentation of program projects. The final battle between the h7 team and the Red Devils team from Chelyabinsk took place on the big screen right in front of the audience in the hall. Both teams decided first of all not to score points, but to interfere with the enemy, but the best result was Ivanovtsev.
At the competition of algorithms , they worked on tasks that are difficult to describe, not like what to perform in a stressful atmosphere for several hours. Alexander Kuprin from the Oryol Polytechnic University turned out to be the best in the difficult task of extreme programming, Ivan Naumenko from SPSU and Alexey Boyko from TUSUR (Tomsk), respectively, took second places.
Rogerio Panigassi (Rogerio Panigassi), coordinator of the international competition Imagine Cup, on the sidelines said that today the fastest cup is gaining popularity in Eastern Europe, Latin America (in Brazil - the second largest community of IC students) and South-East Asia. This is connected with the fact that the contest provides a real opportunity to express oneself, an opportunity to understand what today wants to see a business and what it takes to promote and develop its idea. In Russia, for example, the finalists of the competition are “caught” by people from the Foundation for Assistance to the Development of Small Forms of Enterprises in the NTS with their program “ UMNIK ”. In the US and Western Europe, the Imagine Cup is also popular, but the attitude towards it there is somewhat different.
On the question of how Microsoft relates to the fact that such a number of talents in developing countries could hardly have expressed themselves without such a rampant piracy that we have in place, Rogério responded with a trump card - DreamSpark , launched in February by Bill Gates himself. Thanks to her, every student in any country in the world can get MS software for free. I did not miss the opportunity to talk about it with Microsoft International Student Programs Coordinator Leandro Doeyo, who is in charge of her at the main office of the corporation.
Leandro said that in the two months that have passed since the launch of DreamSpark, the number of software downloads from the site reached 450,000. The most popular program was in developed countries: USA, UK, Canada, Germany, France. But this is not due to the fact that in these countries everyone is more willing to get free software, but to the fact that in most other countries, interaction with educational institutions is just beginning to verify the program users as students.
In general, the Imagine Cup competition is actually an exciting event that can also bring real benefits to the participants, which every year becomes more and more.
Software projects (Software Design) - the main category of competition. Within its framework, teams create software to implement some of their ideas that fit into the theme of the competition, which changes annually. This year it was the “Environment”. In the final, teams from Moscow, St. Petersburg, Nizhny Novgorod, Volgograd, Chelyabinsk and Tomsk presented their works. At the decisive stage of the competition, they got through the qualifying stages in the regions that were held in the tenth of March. First place in the Russian final gives the winning team the right to a Microsoft-paid trip to Paris, where this year the international final is held.
Last year, a team from MAI with its Mapedia program became the winner in the category. In last year's Cup capital, Seoul, she managed to reach the semifinals. This year the national team Ignition from St. Petersburg, representing three universities (ITMO, St. Petersburg State University, LETI) and the Research Institute of Forestry, had the honor to represent Russia this year. Their project, codenamed Arina, is a “decision support system for fighting forest fires”. The names of the characters: Anatoly Nikitin, Roman Belov, Daria Elkina and the leader of the project, Yuri Z. Shur.
Simply put, Arina is a program that calculates optimal fire extinguishing methods based on terrain features, meteorological conditions, forest cover type, and many other parameters. These parameters are taken into account in the mathematical model developed at the Research Institute of Physical Chemistry on the basis of the methods used abroad and own experience. The model is refined by experimental data that have accumulated a great many over the years of observation of fires. The system has already been tested on real (almost random) fires and showed almost complete coincidence of the calculated predictions of it with reality. Work on improving it will continue.
The honorable second place was taken by the .Life team from the Nizhny Novgorod State University with a program for calculating pollutants from human activity. The three-dimensional visualizer allows you to manually drag a “smoky” object (for example, a factory) across the locality and observe the change in the state diagram of the biosphere in its vicinity.
Third place went to the team MSTU. Bauman and MIPT ecopatrol with their project of detecting the harmful effects of man through remote-controlled helicopters.
')
“Besides the fact that it’s just interesting, the guys from St. Petersburg have now won almost a million rubles - a paid trip to Paris with a stay in a luxury hotel in the city center,” says Igor Lizunov, a member of the h7 team from Chelyabinsk, who represented our country at the international the final of the competition in another category - " Project Hoshi ". The task of the participants of this competition, traditionally - to save the world. Conventionally, it can be represented as the creation of artificial intelligence, which will manage the army of robots in the likeness of a strategic game. On the map of the area, which may be the human body or the vicinity of Lake Baikal, the robots of the two teams fight each other, achieving goals and hindering their achievement by the enemy.
Having passed the qualifying rounds in the regions, the finalists pass the draw and compete according to the Olympic system in a separate room, far from the noisy presentation of program projects. The final battle between the h7 team and the Red Devils team from Chelyabinsk took place on the big screen right in front of the audience in the hall. Both teams decided first of all not to score points, but to interfere with the enemy, but the best result was Ivanovtsev.
At the competition of algorithms , they worked on tasks that are difficult to describe, not like what to perform in a stressful atmosphere for several hours. Alexander Kuprin from the Oryol Polytechnic University turned out to be the best in the difficult task of extreme programming, Ivan Naumenko from SPSU and Alexey Boyko from TUSUR (Tomsk), respectively, took second places.
Rogerio Panigassi (Rogerio Panigassi), coordinator of the international competition Imagine Cup, on the sidelines said that today the fastest cup is gaining popularity in Eastern Europe, Latin America (in Brazil - the second largest community of IC students) and South-East Asia. This is connected with the fact that the contest provides a real opportunity to express oneself, an opportunity to understand what today wants to see a business and what it takes to promote and develop its idea. In Russia, for example, the finalists of the competition are “caught” by people from the Foundation for Assistance to the Development of Small Forms of Enterprises in the NTS with their program “ UMNIK ”. In the US and Western Europe, the Imagine Cup is also popular, but the attitude towards it there is somewhat different.On the question of how Microsoft relates to the fact that such a number of talents in developing countries could hardly have expressed themselves without such a rampant piracy that we have in place, Rogério responded with a trump card - DreamSpark , launched in February by Bill Gates himself. Thanks to her, every student in any country in the world can get MS software for free. I did not miss the opportunity to talk about it with Microsoft International Student Programs Coordinator Leandro Doeyo, who is in charge of her at the main office of the corporation.
Leandro said that in the two months that have passed since the launch of DreamSpark, the number of software downloads from the site reached 450,000. The most popular program was in developed countries: USA, UK, Canada, Germany, France. But this is not due to the fact that in these countries everyone is more willing to get free software, but to the fact that in most other countries, interaction with educational institutions is just beginning to verify the program users as students.
In general, the Imagine Cup competition is actually an exciting event that can also bring real benefits to the participants, which every year becomes more and more.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/23557/
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