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A TEAM of four Australian students has won a major international software competition – from a pool of 200,000 students from 100 countries – for a designing an innovative water-saving software solution.
The winners of the Microsoft-sponsored event were announced at the special Imagine Cup event at Louvre in Paris.
Team SOAK (Smart Operational Agricultural ToolKit) won first prize in the worldwide Software Design invitational, while Singapore's Team Trail Blazers won the Embedded Development invitational, and Brazil's Mother Gaia Studio won the Game Development challenge.
The four team members – David Burela, Dimaz Pramudya, Ed Hooper, Long Zheng – are from the University of Melbourne, Monash University, the University of Tasmania, and Swinburne University of Technology.
The Team website says the Project “SOAK is an integrated software and hardware platform with the aspiration of helping farmers achieve sustainable use of their land.”
“This is achieved through the integrated use of environmental sensing, rich visual front ends to display the information to the farmer, and a subsystem which controls farm equipment such as sprinkler systems.”
The team spent six months on the project in consulting with farmers, engineers and developing the software.
The team will receive intense business and technology training as part of the Imagine Cup Innovation Accelerator program, co-sponsored by Microsoft and British Telecom.
“The creativity demonstrated by the competitors this year has shown that tomorrow's technology leaders are ready to apply their solutions to real-world issues,” said Joe Black, director of Business Development for Emerging Technologies, BT.
“The Imagine Cup Innovation Accelerator is an exceptional opportunity for young developers to explore the entrepreneurial possibilities of their software solutions,” Mr Black said.
“We are excited to offer our encouragement, guidance, and support to these talented students through comprehensive training sessions to help students bring their ideas to fruition.”
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