Last Wednesday saw the gathering of press, industry and faculty at the Microsoft HQ in Sydney for the Australian finals of the 2009 Imagine Cup. The Imagine Cup is a worldwide competition open to students where they compete in multiple fields to solve a specified problem. This year students could choose from one of the many UN Millennium Goals, and last Wednesday we saw the delivered solutions for the Software Design category. The winner of this event will go on to Egypt to compete in the worldwide finals and hopefully bring the cup back home for Australia. (Last year the Aussie Team SOAK won)

Wednesday night the top 5 teams, three from the University of Canberra, one from the University of Western Sydney, and one from the University of Technology Sydney.

More images and the results after the jump.

This year the AU finals were open to the public, and the turnout was very good. Many representatives from the press, industry and faculty attended and it looked like everyone enjoyed themselves.

The night was split into two parts, first three of the groups presented, then a light dinner before the final two groups presented and the judges ranked them. Those who attended also went into the draw to win one of two XBOX360 Elite consoles.

The first three groups were all from the University of Canberra, two Green solutions and an interesting solution for employment in areas like Africa where mobile penetration is high, but technology in general is not. Some slight demo mishaps occurred, however I think that all teams managed to convey their ideas very well. Team eGreen used RFID and a mix of Microsoft technologies including even Windows Sidebar to power a Carbon Emissions rating scheme, which allows the consumer to make informed decisions about how eco-friendly each product is.

Team iWork presented a system that allows for employers to contact casual employees for work using just mobile phones and SMS messages. The employee registers for the service online, and then is sent job offers based on their availability and skills. The system uses an intelligent parser to understand what the employer wants and send the offer to those interested, who can reply by phone, and even get information like weather or directions to the job. (Using MapPoint)

Team deCarbonate presented web solution using Silverlight that provides a social service for managing your eco-emissions. Users can logon to the website, provide information on their utilities usage, fuel consumption etc, and then can be provided with suggestions for ways to improve their emissions, with easy linking to carpool programs or green gas plans. The system adds a social element, with integration with Twitter, Facebook (future) and presents it all with some really nice charts and presentation.

After a nice light dinner, everyone returned to watch Team Firefighters from UTS present a system for monitoring bushland around vulnerable areas for fire conditions, and manage evacuations and response teams in the area. They used an interesting system of wireless nodes that consist of small, cheap monitoring devices that can even be airdropped into the bushland, and can survive for up to 900 days. These nodes monitor different environmental variables and if a potential bushfire is detected, the wireless network can send this information to a command station where appropriate action can be taken.

The nice part is that the system includes information about residents and local response teams, so for example, nearby emergency services can be notified about a disabled person near the danger zone, and using a mobile client, the emergency service can evacuate the person and update the command center.

Last but not least, Team Xtreme from UWS presented an awesome looking solution for helping fire services manage their hazard reduction activities. The system uses the CTP Virtual Earth ASP.Net control to present a visual interface that allows for park rangers, fire services, scientists, or anyone else, to mark down areas of fauna and flora, and appropriately schedule hazard reduction activities such as backburning. The cool part about this is it looks like a really polished WPF application, however it is all contained inside the browser.

This project, entitled FLAME,  was presented in one of the most engaging sessions of the night, and the presentation and level of polish was amazing. However no-one knew who would win when the judges left the room to deliberate, and in my opinion, the final result was a surprise.

But first, we got an insight into what Microsoft does with its partners to help those who are disadvantaged in Australia (aside from the Imagine Cup) through some interesting videos showcasing Indigenous learning through a “Clippy” style program, as well as a Tablet PC learning package created by Readify that allows disabled children to express themselves using imagery and the Text-to-Speech engine in Windows Vista.

Once the judges returned, everything got back underway, and after presenting the audience prizes, the winners were announced. In shared 4th place, Team iWork and Team Firefighters. In 3rd place, Team deCarbonate. Then presented together, in 2nd place Team Xtreme, and winning the oversized-novelty boarding pass to Egypt, Team eGreen. Congratulations to all teams for making it this far, and further congratulations to Team eGreen for gaining the chance to represent Australia in the 2009 Imagine Cup in Egypt! (No pressure)

Thanks to Michael Kordahi (@delic8genius) for taking the photos of the night, you can find them all on Flickr here. Thanks also to Microsoft for hosting the event, and running the Imagine Cup, as well as all of the other Microsoft staff that worked on making this succeed, awesome work!

For more information, keep watching this blog, and the official MS OZ Academic blog.