FRIDAY, March 29, 2024
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Thai team makes it Microsoft’s Imagine Cup finals

Thai team makes it Microsoft’s Imagine Cup finals

Microsoft Corp on Monday announced the top four finalists of its 2021 Imagine Cup competition, with Thailand’s Team Threeotech emerging top in the Lifestyle category.

This was after an exciting two rounds of semi-finals at which the 12 shortlisted teams provided a three-minute project pitch followed by a Q&A session with judges to compete for a win in the World Championships in May.

This year’s Imagine Cup virtual competition saw teams from 163 countries using innovative technologies like AI, Power Platform and Big Data to develop their ideas into impactful technological solutions that make a difference.

The finalists had to submit innovations that could be applied in one of the four categories, namely Earth, Education, Healthcare and Lifestyle.

The four finalists impressed the judges with their innovative ideas, pushing the envelope on improving society as well as creating a brighter, more inclusive future.

Thailand’s Team Threeotech came up with “JustSigns”, a web application for content creators to create sign language captions to improve media accessibility for their hearing-impaired viewers.

In the Earth category, New Zealand’s Team ProTag created "ProTag", a smart ear tag for livestock that uses technologies like mixed reality, IoT and Azure to detect the early onset of illness in real-time. This is part of efforts to inculcate sustainable farming, lower costs and increase animal welfare along with providing farmers with peace of mind.

Both these teams will be competing against a team each from Kenya and from the United States for the Imagine Cup trophy, a US$75,000 cash prize and a mentoring session with Microsoft Corp’s chief executive officer Satya Nadella.

Other teams from Asia that participated in the semi-finals are:

Team Intelli-Sense (India): Under the Healthcare category, the team developed “Vision” – an app that gives the visually impaired a “sense of vision” by helping them perceive their surrounding in real-time.

Team DataMasker (China): Under the Lifestyle category, the team came up with “WellMask”, an AI “mask” built to enhance social interaction by supporting "real-time speech transcription", "intention extraction" and "emotion recognition".

Team Virtual Radiologist (Nepal): Under the Earth category, the team came up with “Pico Sat”, a miniature version of an environmental satellite that utilises the Azure platform and PowerBI. It aims to provide information about your environment – altitude, temperature, humidity, pressure, dust and pressure level of the present time – be it a small room or open space.

Held annually since 2003, the Microsoft Imagine Cup is the world's top student technology competition. This year’s contest encouraged participants to “Dream It. Build It. Live It” and create applications that shape how individuals live, work and play.

Visit https://www.imaginecup.com/ for more information.

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