Archive for the ‘ Imagine Cup ’ Category

Balkan Olympiad in Informatics – 2011

This year, the 19th edition of the Balkan Olympiad in Informatics, along with the 5th edition of the Junior Balkan Olympiad in Informatics, were both held in my home town – Bistrița, Romania. On behalf of Microsoft Romania, I was asked to talk about some of the new technology trends (the Cloud, Windows Azure and the Microsoft Web Platform) to the students and teachers present there. We had the session this Friday and along with Răzvan Rusu, who is a Microsoft Student Partner and he talked about the MSP program, Imagine Cup and DreamSpark - the session was held in the very highschool where I graduated 8 years ago, so it was a great opportunity for me to be able to visit it again.

The discussion was a very interesting one, and the audience was very excited about opportunities they didn’t even know existed until then. I also promised all the students I’ll publish the slides – so, without further ado:

2011
07/09
CATEGORY
Events
Imagine Cup
Life
Microsoft
MVP
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Romania wins SD and IT at Imagine Cup 2009

CAIRO, Egypt — July 7, 2009 — After an intense competition among finalists chosen from a pool of more than 300,000 students from more than 100 countries and regions, Microsoft Corp. announced the winners of Imagine Cup 2009. Celebrating first place, Romania’s Team SYTECH won the worldwide Software Design invitational, South Korea’s Team Wafree won the Embedded Development invitational and Brazil’s Team LEVV It won the Game Development challenge. Imagine Cup, the world’s premier student technology competition, empowers students to unlock their creative genius and build solutions that tackle real-world issues facing society today. [Article - Press release]

Also, on IT Challenge, Cosmin Ilie won the first place. :)

Software Design – The Sytech team (Adrian Buzgar, Calin Juravle, Andreas Resios – Mentor: Sabin Buraga)

IT Challenge – Cosmin Ilie

Congrats to everyone involved! :D

More details, in Romanian, on Valy Greavu’s blog.

2009
07/08
CATEGORY
Imagine Cup
Microsoft
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The finals are over

The Imagine Cup finals ended yesterday. My team took 3rd prize, a rather disappointing outcome – but not really such an unexpected one. In my view, there were some flaws in respecting the evaluation criteria, but that’s a whole different story, and I’m not really into giving any public details. I guess we’ll have to settle with the “maybe next year” pats on our backs for now.

I’ll publish the specs for our solution sometimes next week (along with some of the presentations and labs I held at the Microsoft Academic Program events in my University). :)

2006
04/21
CATEGORY
Events
Imagine Cup
Life
Microsoft
Rant
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Imagine Cup national finals

As I previously mentioned, the Imagine Cup Software Design finals are about to take place next week. There will also be a public event, where the top 10 teams that have qualified for this phase will present their solutions. You can check out more details about the event (in Romanian) here.

2006
04/14
CATEGORY
Events
Imagine Cup
Microsoft
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We are in the national finals!

The results for the Romanian Imagine Cup Software Design invitational were announced today, and our team (Transcent) is among the 10 teams that have qualified to the national phase of the competiton. Yay us! :)

The finals will take place on April 18th-21st, in Cluj-Napoca. Since this is also the city where my university is, that means I won’t be travelling much. Anyway, it’s a long way to go, so I’ll keep you posted with whatever comes up.

2006
04/04
CATEGORY
Imagine Cup
Microsoft
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Imagine Cup, local SD first round

As I’ve already mentioned in my previous post, March 15th was the set date for the local Software Design invitational contest in our University. One of the 11 teams that announced they were going to participate apparently couldn’t make it, so we only had 10 teams. Every team had about 20-25 minutes to present their solution, so the whole event took around 6 hours (we had a short break after the first 5 teams, and some 30-40 minutes in the end, before the jury could decide the final rankings).

Quite a few interesting projects, I might say – there’s definitely room for improvement in some cases (and this might be a great starting point for next year’s participation), but all in all we’ve had some pretty impressive ideas going on and about.

Three of the projects (and their respective teams) advanced to the next round:

  1. Assistant X – Pink Milk
    • Horea Posogan
    • Andrei Csibi
    • Caius Preda
    • Stefan Contiu
  2. SerenityNow! – Transcent
    • Silviu Niculita
    • Ionut Mitrea
    • Andrei Mihai
    • Tudor Damian
  3. Global Environment Project – 911UBB
    • Paul-Valentin Borza
    • Daniel-Constantin Ghita
    • Mihai Dan Nadas
    • Ovidiu-Dumitru Sabou

I don’t believe that publishing the details about their implementation right now would be the best thing to do, but I’m sure we’ll be able to do that after the national phase of the contest. For now, the teams advancing to the second round will face an online (non-interactive) elimination phase, where the jury will select 10 out of all the projects that advanced to this round. Hopefully, my team will make it to the third round once again… :)

2006
03/16
CATEGORY
Imagine Cup
Microsoft
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Local Imagine Cup Round – Software Design

We still have 2 days until the local round of the Imagine Cup Software Design invitational at the “Babes-Bolyai” University in Cluj-Napoca. Here is the official information:

Date and time: Wednesday, March 15th – 10:00 a.m.
Location: University Campus, room C335
Number of teams: 11

We’ll have 3 or 4 teams advancing to the next round, depending on how good the solutions are. There will be prizes for the teams that qualify to the next round: each of the team members will receive a copy of either Customizing the Microsoft .NET Framework Common Language Runtime or Programming Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0 Core Reference. There may be some other prizes, but it’s nothing official yet.

You can find more information on our Microsoft Academic Program website (in Romanian). Everyone who’s interested is free to join us. :)

2006
03/13
CATEGORY
Imagine Cup
Microsoft
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