Imagine Cup 2013 world finals takes place in St Petersburg

The Imagine Cup worldwide finals 2013 was held in St Petersburg, Russia.

300 of the brightest students from 70 countries worldwide attended, with backgrounds in software engineering and CS, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering and other disciplines. They presented viva-style presentations and live demos to a panel of international judges.

From University College London, our own Dr Dean Mohamedally attended as a judge in the World Citizenship Category. He writes:

"The ambition and motivation of these students to build not just the next big thing but to solve a real-world problem was amazing to witness.

I had the privilege to work alongside Bill Buxton, Principal Researcher for Microsoft Research, amongst other senior members from the Xbox team, Skype, Facebook and other leading organisations. Though students were evidently nervous, they got this far from their own local country competitions to stand on a world stage. The presentation ceremony and awards was presented by Matt Smith (Dr Who!) in the heart of St Petersburg, which was filmed and livecast.

In our World Citizenship category the winners were: a direct impact service to food distribution in poverty-stricken areas (3rd-Australia team), hearing loss filtering to be embedded in media devices (2nd-Taiwan team) and a mobile device for blood-type scanning and analysis (1st-Portugal team, 50,000 Euros). The combination of good theory review, eliciting clear requirements, examining project data to refine accuracy in development and testing, listening to peers outside of the field and collaborating across disciplines and finally pushing to reach market attention made these clear winners". Also we were especially proud to see the UK team win first prize (50,000 Euros) in their Innovation category up against other countries - go team GB!

UCL Faculty of Engineering looks forward to our students participating in the next Imagine Cup 2014 - the finals will be next hosted at Microsoft HQ in Redmond, Seattle!

Students can contact us for more details if they have a project idea that they would like to get started on!