Team Mother Gaia Studios from Brazil: Winner of the Game Development Competition!

Team RedDevils from Russia: Winner of the Project Hoshimi Competition!

IT Challenge Winner Jean Benoit Paux from France!

Algorithm Winner Roman Koshlyak from Ukraine!

Team Provisio from the United States: Winner of the Photography Competition!

Team EcoVis from the United States: Winner of the Interface Design Competition!

Team NEIP from Korea: Winner of the Short Film Competition!

ALL Imagine Cup 2008 Winners on the stage!

Team Protasis from Greece is one of the big stories of this year's Imagine Cup. Imagine a world where a 16-year-old-- still in high school-- wins his country's local software design competition against teams of four who are in college?
Anthony Platanios of Team Protasis is that person!

He developed a smart house technology system that reduces your home's carbon footprint. It's divided into a PC application, a sensor network, a mobile phone, and a PDA application, a PC client, a Web server, and a Web page. The PC application uses artificial intelligence, by means of fuzzy logic and a smart algorithm. It receives data from the sensors, processes this data, and sends other data back to the sensors (for example, a command to turn off a light). Through this system, it reduces your home’s consumption of electrical energy, water, and oil. Furthermore, it gives you realtime information such as electrical energy consumption in kWh, water consumption, oil consumption, and voltage in graphical format. It also sends data to the online server, which creates statistics related to other users in your category. You can access the data from the Web page. Moreover, it has more features such as remote control over all the devices of your home, either from the computer, the PDA, or the mobile phone—from any place in the world. It also alerts you to abnormal situations, such as high consumption, high/low voltage (it can turn off all the devices in order to protect them), movement on a place where there should not be, etc. It is very easy to set up and afterwards it does not need any human interaction in order to work; that is where artificial intelligence comes into place.

Here Anthony demos his model of Team Greece's Smart House Solution. 

Anthony's project is directly connected to this year’s challenge, because it makes your home ecologically concerned and it adjusts differently to each user while it is being used, so it constantly evolves. Project Protasis enables a sustainable environment by reducing the resources consumed by your home in a smart way.

Anthony's dream is to go to MIT in Boston and I have no doubt he will go to college there or at an equally prestigious school. And in addition to being incredibly articulate, poised, and smart, Anthony is a really nice guy. We all wish him the best, and we congratulate him on his "Smart House technology"-- making your house do the work of reducing your carbon footprint!  We see Anthony as a real inspiration to other high school students who are thinking of competing in the Imagine Cup!

Yep, take a good look! That's what it looks like folks: The Imagine Cup Software Design Trophy. See, there really IS a Cup! It has traveled the world from the USA (2003) to France (2004) to Russia (2005) to Italy (2006) to Thailand (2007)-- and now it is going to get a little time Down Under.

Congratulations to Team SOAK of Australia and to all our Imagine Cup 2008 Champions! And whether or not you won a prize remember: In this competition the PLANET was the winner. So great job everyone for innovating and creating great software that will help the planet! 

We're heading out to the Party now but never fear-- I'll be back online later telling you some more stories about Imagine Cup 2008 and introducing you to more teams!

• Check out this panorama of the Louvre on Channel 8! Click here to watch.

Let's Meet the Game Development Finalists!

Yesterday XNA Product Manager Bill Wagner introduced the Game Development teams at the Finalist presentations at the Louvre. The purpose of this competition is to use Microsoft's XNA technology to create an educational yet entertaining game about creating a sustainable environment.  Each team took on a fresh approach to this big challenge. Team GOMZ from Korea tackled pollution, Team Mother Gaia Studios from Brazil's game teaches players how to create a livable and healthy urban environment, and Team Drunk Puppy Studios' game is a puzzle that challenges players to create a sustainable city that uses clean energy sources. Whichever game you play, you come away with some valuable information-- and have fun at the same time!

Let's take a closer look at the Finalists in the first-ever Imagine Cup Game Development competition. First up:

Drunk Puppy Studios from Belgium: Game Name: Future Flow

Future Flow is a city sim puzzle game. The player is tasked with transforming a polluted and unsustainable city into a clean, sustainable one. There are tools at your disposal including new technologies, renewable energy sources, and your sheer puzzle solving skill. However you must use your limited resources wisely if you are going to succeed in upgrading your city’s outdated infrastructure and finding a way to make Earth's cities last. You can use your existing infrastructure and both renewable and non-renewable resources to build new structures, and to upgrade or demolish outdated ones. You can guide the flows of power, fuel, water, and
food to where they are most needed, as you get closer to your goal of making your city 100% sustainable and environmentally friendly. From time  to time "Tell me more" messages appear which prompt the player to learn more about environment topics."

Conceptually and stylistically, Future Flow borrows from traditional board games and more complex sims like SimCity and Civilization. Your city is represented by hexagonal tiles. Its aim is to educate players about sustainable technologies and the ecological problems we all need to face in the 21st century, and—of course—to be fun and challenging to play.

The team says: " Early on, we decided we wanted to make a fairly simple game that closely followed the theme of sustainability. Together we came up with the concept of a city sim puzzle game with educational elements and a nice 3D interface. Apart from the many technical challenges, our greatest challenge was to get the game from a rather vague concept to a fully playable game in the limited time we had. It was always a balancing act, meeting deadlines
and working on Future Flow without neglecting our other responsibilities and personal lives."

Last night after their presentation I asked them how they planned to celebrate: "We're going to see Paris and live up to our team's name!" they announced. Here's a picture of the team yesterday:

• Team Wings from China has created a solution called "Aquamarine: A Distributed Real-Time Oil Protection System." The team explained that oil pollution on the coast is a real problem for the whole planet, but it's very hard to get accurate real-time data on oil spills. Using their system, a series of small buoys sends data back to scientists monitoring oil levels with a very high level of accuracy at a low cost. "Our dream is that one day we can use technology to make the ocean forever blue!" says Team Wings.

• Team Acid Rain from Ireland drove their embedded device to Paris! Acid Rain has created an embedded system that enables a car to run on vegetable oil. It's the only solution on the market that lets you run your car on any plant oil. The problem with using plant oil in cars is that 1) the viscosity of oil is higher than diesel, and 2) vegetable oil has a higher combustion rate than diesel. Also different components of the engine need to be at different temperatures.  The eBox that the team used offers the perfect solution. They created an embedded control system that constantly monitors engine temperature by taking real time data from the engine and making adjustments. Their trip to Paris was 100 % carbon neutral and best of all the system pays for itself after 4700 miles!
  
  Acid Rain had a demo of their car, the "VoilaMobile" in front of the hotel the other day-- here are a few snapshots I got:

• Team Here Rose from Korea invented a "wildlife crossing alert system" that reduces animal/human fatalities on highways by sensing when animals are crossing and alerting drivers to stop. This one was a real crowd-pleaser! The video of cute furry animals wondering whether or not to cross the road definitely outlined the importance of this problem, and then the graphics of a cow flying through the air (with no alert system) vs. a cow safely crossing a road while the driver received an alert to stop and wait for the cow, really made their case! The team explains, "Our solution is designed to prevent and monitor road kill based on acoustic source localization technology. Collisions between animals and vehicles are an important transportation challenge across the world. It is estimated that over one million vertebrate animals fall victim to automobile collisions every day in the United States. Road kill causes not only environmental deterioration but also human fatalities and over $1 billion in property damage per year. The object of our proposed device is to analyze the direction of the acoustic source and to obtain the animal's location to monitor and prevent road kill. Stored data can be accessed through a Web site that uses Virtual Earth and Silverlight to visualize the data and user interfaces.

• Singapore's Trail Blazers team has created a robot that senses indoor air pollution. The team wisely points out that since most people spend 90 % of their time indoors it's vital to have clean air in buildings that meets safety standards. They describe their device as a "risk management system as well as a compliance monitoring tool that enables maintenance of strict safety levels." The potential market for their product is huge-- it's relevant for commercial building owners, building and estates management, and security agencies. Their demo showed how the robot is equipped with both a camera (we got some nice views of the crowd as the camera looked at us from the stage) and provides real time data on temperature and air quality (good news! The Louvre's air quality is excellent!)

• Ukraine's Sun Round Sky Around team from the Kharkiv National University of Radio Electronics has created a mobile ecomonitoring system. The team explains: "In order to proactively respond to a changing environment, you must to be able to react instantaneously to fluid environment conditions. Of particular interest are the changes occurring in the environment that are a result of human origin. To estimate the human influence on an environment, we chose to map these changes in time and space. In our mapping solution, the parameters of separate environment pollutants are overlaid on a digital map of the area of interest.
  We call our mapping system the Mobile Eco-Monitoring System (MES). The EMS monitors environmental conditions as individual objects. To do this, we use the eBox 4300 with a GPS receiver as well as an EcoSensor Device that interacts with the eBox. The ecoSensor communicates with the eBox wirelessly. The EcoSensor can automatically measure multiple environmental variables which enables us to take measurements of environment characteristics.
  This information is then processed and transmitted along with the appropriate GPS coordinates to a remote web server. Once at the web server, complex estimations of the situation being monitored can be made and an appropriate response recommended."

Want to see the ED teams in action?

•  You can also watch some Embedded Teams demo their projects on Channel 8: Click here to watch
• Meet Team Acid Rain from Ireland: Click here to watch

•  Watch it here!