Three students from the Faculty of Communication and Environment at Rhein-Waal University of Applied Sciences have done it: they have qualified for this year’s “World Finals” of the Microsoft Imagine Cup, which will take place in Seattle from 22 July to 26 July 2018.
This is the 16th time that Microsoft has organised this global competition to promote young IT talent and up-and-coming developers. The Imagine Cup offers school pupils and university students with an interest in technology the opportunity to compete against each other in teams with their own projects. This year’s theme is ‘Code with purpose!’. Forty-nine teams from around the world have qualified for the grand final.
Students Malte Götz, Philipp Gröll and Rafael Regh, who are studying Media and Communication Informatics and E-Government, form one of the four teams that will represent the Central Europe region next week at the Microsoft Campus in Redmond. The other three teams are from the Technical University of Munich (TUM), Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (LMU) and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT).
As the ‘Pavo’ team, the three students from Kamp-Lintfort are developing software that describes images on websites and, in future, also in documents or graphical user interfaces for blind and visually impaired people. Although it is possible – and indeed intended – to insert image descriptions manually in HTML or the standards for Word and PDF documents, for example, these are usually inadequate or do not exist at all. The images are analysed and descriptions generated with the help of artificial intelligence (AI). People without visual impairments can view an overview of the images without descriptions, alongside the automatically generated image descriptions, and improve the descriptions, thereby training the AI and helping it to learn.
Since 2003, more than 2 million talented developers from around 190 countries have taken part in the Microsoft Imagine Cup. The competition offers them the chance to present their own ideas. They can bring these to life and launch them onto the market in collaboration with mentors and industry experts. The winning team can win up to 100,000 USD. The team in second place receives up to 30,000 USD. Up to 15,000 USD is awarded to teams for the best projects in the fields of artificial intelligence, big data and mixed reality. For participants, the competition can not only mark the start of an IT career, but it also lays the foundations for national or global collaborations with investors, start-ups, major global IT and research organisations, and with Microsoft itself.
