July 3, 2008
6 American Teams Make It to Finals of Microsoft's Imagine Cup
An interface that allows blind people to access the Web, a photo essay on tropical-rain-forest sustainability, and a system that saves energy by automatically adjusting the power usage of appliances are among the six projects from American students that have made it to the finals of Microsoft’s sixth annual Imagine Cup.
The international competition, which kicked off today in Paris, comes with a cash award of $240,000. This year’s edition challenges students to find new ways to use technology to help sustain the environment.
In the interface-design category, a duo from Indiana University designed a Web site that allowed students who were participating in a campus energy challenge to compare their dorm’s consumption with other dorms’, and also suggested conservation actions. Another student, from Arizona State University, has developed a user interface to teach people to be sustainable in their homes.
A team from California State University at Long Beach has designed an embedded system that adjusts the power consumption of home appliances, and a group from the Rochester Institute of Technology has created a software program that allows mobile-phone users to access and control environment data collected from a network of sensors.
Two students from Wayne State University are competing in the photography category with a photo essay that portrays a global movement that wants to slow the effects of global warming and deforestation.
A Ph.D. candidate in computer science and engineering at the University of Washington has won the Interface Design Technology Award for a screen-reading interface that allows blind people to access the Internet.
More than 200,000 students from all over the world registered in the Imagine Cup and 370 of them, from 61 countries, have made it to the weeklong finals. The winners will be announced on July 8. More information is available on the Imagine Cup Finals Web site. —Maria José Viñas
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To get that $240,000 for awarding as prize money, Microsoft only had to invest about $750,000 in its business. That’s because the corporation receives in excess of 32% return-on-investment.
If the oil companies, for example, wanted to sponsor a similar contest, they would have to invest nearly $2.9 million in their high-risk business, because their ROI, at a little more than 8%, is lower than the average for all of American industry. Their profit dollar-amounts — constantly and misleadingly emphasized by the media — are high for the obvious reason that they sell a lot of product (and, therefore, put a huge amount of their capital at risk).
Unlike some computer scientists, I’m all for Microsoft, whose risk-taking has produced products that have transformed our society, mostly for the better.
But speaking of the race towards sustainability, I also support the oil companies and the prosperous world they have helped create. Because of that prosperity, we will eventually be able to develop sustainable, low-polluting energy sources. Without it, we could never have sustained our escape from the darkness of ignorance, disease, and isolation.
— S. Britchky Jul 3, 04:56 PM #
Microsoft transformed our society? How can that be when Microsoft has done nothing original in the history of the company except pioneer a new class of predatory business practices? The technology they sell has all been done elsewhere; all Microsoft does is copy. And their profitability comes from two core products, Windows and Office for which they have established a monopoly position. NOTHING else that Microsoft has invested in is profitable, most likely because if they do not have a monopoly position they always lose out to their competition – the Wii in game consoles, Google in search, etc.
— otbricki Jul 9, 02:57 PM #