One more team one might wish to take a look at for this year’s Imagine Cup World Finals, Codec. Codec aims to decode student, teacher, and parent interaction in typical teaching scenarios. They have developed a system, EduVaTech, which consists of a website, a Windows Phone application, and SMS alerts.

Team members Raees Rahim, Jasmine Farley, and Donald Modeste see their system as a means of generally improving quality of life. Given education’s positive correlation with happiness and quality of life, they set out to remove barriers to education, starting with student motivation. By allowing students to communicate their feelings about a class, such as whether or not it is “boring”, they hope teachers can respond to student concerns quickly.

If you think Codec has a good idea, be sure to vote for them in the people’s choice awards.

Coming to compete in the Imagine Cup all the way from Vietnam, team MiGi wants to make the word more sustainable. Competing in the general software design category, MiGi wishes to connect those who wish to dispose of items to those in need of items. The team has created a website designed to allow for exchanges. Rather than throwing something out, you simply list your item you would like to get rid of, and someone else can offer to take it off your hands. Essentially, a form of “pre-cycling.”

The team has also produced a Windows Phone 7 application that they’ll be demoing at this year’s World Finals in New York. While there are several similar applications already in place in the US and Europe, such applications are uncommon in MiGi’s home, Vietnam. They hope to drive adoption of theirs and similar sites to reduce environmental damage, attacking the Environmental Sustainability Millennium Development Goal.

Endeavor_Design from Romania will be at the Imagine Cup World Finals, working on some seriously awesome embedded software. Team members Iuliana Valcea and Monica Claudia Dobrea have developed machine learning algorithms for autonomous robots. Their project, autoRobot, allows a robot to take the place of a human operator in cases where no suitable human is available. The result? A prototype robot which literally controls itself, and avoids collisions with obstacles in it’s environment.

This has several practical implications. For the sake of example, consider a robot used for search and rescue operations after a natural disaster, such as an earthquake or tornado. Such machines are typically controlled by a human operator, who looks at images radioed back from cameras mounted on the robot, and radios commands to the robot’s motors to control it’s direction. That system works great — until the robot goes under a piece of rubble and loses contact with the operator’s transmitter. If that happens, currently someone would have to go into the potentially dangerous situation (e.g. why the robot was deployed in the first place) to retrieve the machine, as well as carry out its original task. The technology inside autoRobot would allow such a search and rescue robot to continue autonomously, attempting to find it’s controlling radio signal once more. This is both safer and cheaper than attempting to retrieve the machine manually.

Another case would be for severely disabled people, who use nontraditional means of controlling electric wheelchairs. Such means often work based on subtle motions of the disabled person, such as an eyebrow twitch. Unfortunately, such systems aren’t able to react quickly — if the disabled person sees an obstacle they might not be able to correct the chair’s motion quickly enough. The technology that powers Endeavor_Design’s prototype would be able to step in and avoid collision with obstacles.

Finally, such a system could be used for drivers asleep at the wheel. Fatigue is a contributing factor in several accidents, and the technology for detecting a sleeping driver is already relatively commonplace. What is lacking, however, is a system which tells the car what to do after it has detected that the driver is asleep. autoRobot‘s internals could be used to prevent collisions with other vehicles, potentially saving the lives of those in the car.

autoRobot uses machine learning algorithms similar to those recently deployed in Microsoft’s Kinect sensor. Rather than attempt to solve the exact answer as is done in traditional algorithms, machine learning systems are “trained”, as a baby would be, using large amounts of sample data. Once enough data is collected, these algorithms “learn” to avoid entering situations where a collision would be likely.

The team has constructed a prototype robot using their machine learning technology, and produced a series of visualizations showcasing a room containing several robots using this technology. At both similar and dissimilar speeds, each robot independently learns to avoid collisions with the walls of the room, and with other robots it encounters. Note how early on (the P1 videos), the robots collide with walls, and with each other, but as the algorithm learns, the machines successfully avoid collisions on a regular basis (in the P2 videos).

Endeavor_Design’s autoRobot has huge potential for generally making the world a safer place. If you think Endeavor_Design has an awesome idea, please vote for them in the Imagine Cup People’s Choice Awards!

Microsoft was kind enough to send me to the Imagine Cup US Finals in Redmond this year, and they’ll be sending me to the world finals in New York in mid July. Not because I’m a competitor — technically they’re bringing me along as “press”… Anyway, there seems to be some confusion as to what the competition actually is, so before I talk about some of the teams over the next couple of weeks, I want to explain how things actually work.

The biggest confusion I see about the Imagine Cup is that people assume it is a programming contest. It is not. A typical programming contest takes a bunch of people, puts them in a room, gives them an interesting programming problem, and chooses the best implementation that solves that problem. It’s solely a test to see how well someone can write code. Imagine Cup is different. It’s not about code, it’s about ideas. That is, technical ideas which help solve the Millennium Development Goals of the United Nations (i.e. End Poverty and Hunger, Universal Education, Gender Equality, Child Health, Maternal Health, Combat HIV/AIDS, Environmental Sustainability, and Global Partnership). This competition doesn’t care how well you can write software. Rather, it cares about solving the world’s problems and the solutions that the competing students and teams generate.

The second thing to note about the Imagine Cup is that it is a “federation of competitions”. It’s not a one-shot deal. Each category is a completely separate competition with completely different rules. There are a ton of categories, such as general Software Design, Game Design for Windows Phone, Game Design for XBox/PC, etc. There are also a set of “challenges” — which are similar to the normal categorical competitions but which generally are less “big” in terms of the number or students involved. There’s also no rigid hierarchical structure, e.g. “first you start at the regional level, then you go to the national level, then you go to the world level, and so on….”. Each competition defines its own leveling system depending on the number of competitors, different participating countries, and other such things.

For example, the Software Design competition has a stipulation that the top team of the US Finals automatically gets entered into the running for the World competition. But the Game Design categories have no such stipulations.

Competitors first come up with an idea that fits their category, and works towards one of the Millennium Goals. They implement a prototype or demo which shows that idea as best they can to a panel of judges. The judges then rank the teams based on the presentations. There is not a prescribed set of criteria for the judges to look for — they choose the teams with the best ideas, and the best execution of those ideas.

US finals judges (lower left) frantically taking notes after the completion of a team's pitch

And… that’s about it. It seems complicated because of the massive number of categories, but the competition — and its goal are simple: get students solving the world’s toughest problems, and let them win fabulous prizes doing it.