Microsoft Imagine cup

Team DrugSafe from India has won a special award under Big Data category and got a prize money of $15,000 at the 2018 Microsoft Imagine Cup world championship held at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, USA recently. They were one of the three student teams representing India at the Imagine Cup 2018 global finals. With DrugSafe, Chidroop I, Pratik Mohapatra, and Srihari HS from R. V. College of Engineering, Bengaluru aim to address the growing global issue of counterfeit drugs by helping people verify the authenticity of medicines. The team encountered the issue of fake medicines when one of their friends showed no signs of recovery after weeks of taking a prescribed medication. Learning that nearly half of all medicines sold in India were fake, they decided to create an app that could authenticate medicines and trace them back to their source. The app uses Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to identify minute details in the design and packaging of medicines and compare them to the original manufacturer’s patented and trademarked attributes. After three levels of checks, discrepancies are flagged to help users identify medicines as counterfeit.

Machine learning and AI-aided statistical analysis also help identify a potential epidemic outbreak in a region. The team designed a simple User Interface (UI) for the app so that it could be used by anyone regardless of age or technical skill and have the widest possible impact. The team plans to utilise the prize money to seek new partnerships and integrate more Azure services into the app to make it more powerful.

Meanwhile, Team smartARM of Canada emerged as the world champion of Imagine Cup 2018 with their robotic prosthetic hand that calculates appropriate grip for objects utlilising Microsoft Azure Machine Learning and Computer Vision. Besides US$85,000 cash prize and an Azure grant worth US$50,000, Team smartARM will also have a mentoring session with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.

Coming in second place was Team iCry2Talk from Greece, whose project enables parents to decipher the message behind a baby’s crying in real-time. The low-cost, non-invasive intelligent technology associates the cries with specific physiological and psychological states, depicting the results in a text, image, and a voice message.

This year, 49 teams from 33 countries, including 20 teams from the Asia Pacific region, were selected to travel to Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington, to showcase their ingenuity in leveraging the power of modern technology to solve some of the world’s pressing challenges. Prior to this, the student teams spent months developing their solutions, go-to-market plans and competing in National Finals. Aparna Gupta, General Manager (India), Commercial Software Engineering, Microsoft said, “At Microsoft, we continue to encourage young innovators to have the courage to step up and develop solutions that will solve real-world problems. We are proud to see so many students on the world stage, sharing game changing ideas that will indefinitely reshape the world.”

Held annually since 2003, the Microsoft Imagine Cup is the world’s premier student technology competition, known affectionately by participants as the “Olympics of student technology competitions”. To date, nearly 1.8 millionstudents from over 190 countrieshave engaged with the Imagine Cup program.