I plan to live forever. So far, so good.

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!

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

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.

As I’ve already mentioned in my previous post, March 15^th 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…

Two other invitationals for this year’s Imagine Cup competitions have started today: Algorithm and IT. The Project Hoshimi – Programming Battle, Short Film and Interface Designer invitationals are well under way, since they started on February 1st. Check out the official Imagine Cup 2006 website for more details. Also, some information relevant to the Romanian Software Design invitational can be found here, along with some other details related to the local phases of the competition.

For those of you who don’t know, Imagine Cup is a competition designed to recognize students who demonstrate excellence in a diverse range of technical and artistic pursuits, and seeks innovative contest entries that address the competition theme. The Imagine Cup adventure began three years ago, and already more than 20,000 students from more than 90 countries have competed. This year, the competition will be even tougher, with more students than ever vying for victory in six Imagine Cup invitational categories, each reflecting this year’s theme: “Imagine a world where technology enables us to live healthier lives.”