The Hindu Business Line : A rich haul

WHAT would you do to get Microsoft to sponsor a holiday for you with 3-4 of your friends, for a six-day stay in Beijing and then for a few more days in an even more exotic place such as Barcelona, Spain? And while you do this, you could even pick up a dream job with Microsoft or a company that has some link to the software giant, along the way.

Sounds like wishful thinking? Not if you participated in, and won this year's Microsoft .Net worldwide competition — open to students graduating this year — that has reached the final round. The Asia-Pacific round took place in February this year and the finals are in Barcelona scheduled for late June. The Microsoft Web site says, "Twelve student teams from 11 countries were selected into the Asia-Pacific finals from 2,981 student teams (that is, more than 15,000 students) to compete for the most innovative Web Services applications developed using VS .NET. The judging panel was made up of renowned professors from top universities around the region."

Kapil Vaidyanathan looked no different when he walked into eWorld's office the other day. But speak to him and you realise that he has done what most kids would dream of. Shared a podium with Bill Gates in front of 9,000 spectators, shook hands with him and received a trophy from him for showing ingenuity in designing a software solution. Vaidyanathan is one of the four-member team that won the first prize in the Asia-Pacific round of the Microsoft .Net competition. His teammates were Anumeha Bisaria, Harishankar Vijayarajan and Kunal Talwar. And the icing on the cake is this: all these Indian students represented Singapore in the competition, and came first! They are about to graduate with an engineering degree from the Nanyang Technology University, Singapore.

Back home, India too won a pride of place (sharing the third prize with China, in the A-Pac round). The team that won this accolade was from the Vivekanand Education Society's Institute of Technology, Mumbai, comprising Yash Doshi, Abhijit Akhawe and Tejas Shah. The team from Taiwan came second.

So, what did these students design that Microsoft was so impressed with?

The Indian Singapore team

The team from Singapore developed a solution for a wireless shopping environment. When you use a trolley in a mall, you have a "single board" computer fixed to it. The computer is connected wirelessly to a central server, via several contact points within the shopping mall.

You choose an item to buy, use a barcode scanner attached to the trolley and you get the information, on the product, displayed on the computer screen. According to Vaidyanathan, helping customers do this themselves helps reduce the queuing time at the checkout counter, from some 25 minutes to 1-2 minutes, especially in large marts. He says that the computer is also touch-screen enabled. Which means that if you want to know where, in the mall, to go to find the next item you want, all you do is run through menus on the touch-screen which tell you where to find that item.

Says Vaidyanathan, "This can be done in two ways: one, with respect to your position where you picked up your last item or through a geographical information system. We currently use the former method in our solution."

The solution also uses the Web to personalise the shopping experience. If one of a couple enters her shopping list on her favourite mart's Web site, the other can access the couple's account on the site, download the shopping list and pick up the items en route home. "This also helps you not to miss out on the items you want," he says.

The solution could also help the mall send out real-time advertisements to shoppers while they shop. For instance, if someone picks up a packet of chips, the mall could send an online coupon to that trolley's computer that gives a discount to the shopper if he/she picks up a bottle of ketchup.

The Indian Singapore team with Bill Gates and the Indian Indian team (top).

Interestingly, all four members of this team are employed, even before they have graduated, with Microsoft or its associates, says Vaidyanathan.

The Indian Indian team

The VESIT team named its solution Sanjeevani meant for the Healthcare industry. The solution helps hospitals capture key information about the environmental conditions and health conditions of people from remote, rural villages and provide for access and intelligent analysis of the collected data to different users. On a community level, this could be crucial in tracing epidemic developments and take preventive action.

It also helps doctors get a list of diagnoses based on symptoms and investigations carried out by them. It helps the doctor write prescriptions for common diseases and to calculate doses of medicines. It also provides a voice interface to the doctors for a hands-free access to the program. To make it easier for patients to understand the prescription, the solution provides for a language translation service.

The system design also allows automatic alerts to people who matter in emergency situations. For instance, the central nurse station can monitor different parameters based on the nature of the ICU and the patient admitted. The system alerts the nurse station when parameters that are being monitored cross threshold limits. Following which, in case of emergency, the nurse can send an alert to the doctor if he is not available.

In case of an emergency such as an accident case, the emergency room dispatches a paramedic team to the location. On the way back they can examine the patient and inform the hospital via a Pocket PC or PDA about the type of complication so that the team at the hospital may be ready with what might be needed as soon as they reach the hospital.

Constant reminders are given to nurses of their schedules and rounds in general wards and ICU. The ICU console also enables remote monitoring of patient parameters, including streamed ECG via Pocket PC to the doctors.

The program also provides intelligent diagnosis to the doctor on the basis of the symptoms. Incidentally, this is a self-learning program - meaning, whenever a patient case is solved, all details relating the symptoms that the patient reported and the treatment given is sent to the program for analysis. On the basis of the analysis, the program updates its database so as to reflect more diseases and possible solutions the next time around.

The solution allows mobile phones and pocket PC to connect to the central server. This means if a doctor is out on duty and an emergency case has reached the hospital, Sanjeevani helps send an alert to the doctor who can best treat the patient. Through video files streamed onto the doctor's mobile phone or pocket PC, the doctor can guide the staff to attend to the patient till he arrives!

Sanjeevani incorporates Image Processing Technologies. This helps the doctor directly load the X-Ray images of the patient from the machine. The doctor can alter the contrast and brightness of the report and also magnify, annotate, measure on the report itself. Also using Speech Recognition engines developed by Microsoft, the solution provides speech-based interactivity to the software. This becomes crucial when the doctor wants to retrieve information while he is performing an operation.

It's yours

And what's more? All that you develop is yours, says Vaidyanathan. Which means that in addition to the prizes you could win (which includes Tablet PCs and PDAs), the solution is your property. If you win a prize, with Microsoft's recognition, you could lure investors and venture capitalists to pour in funds for the solution and become an entrepreneur yourself.

How to compete?

So much for the achievers this year. What about the next? If you want to stake a claim for the Imagine Cup, (which is what Microsoft has named the award for the final winner) next year, all you have to do is get your college to nominate you. Access the Web site, www.microsoft.com/india/academia for details. And what could you expect in the initial, eliminatory rounds? Last year, an online quiz helped narrow down on the regional finalists. This year, a math riddle helped identify the toppers. Microsoft is still to decide what it could use this year for the elimination round.

Do students have to satisfy any conditions to participate? Says a spokesperson, "We are now inviting colleges to nominate MCA and Engineering student teams. An institution can send in any number of teams. The objective of the competition is to encourage the development and consumption of Web services. The project should use technologies that enhance this." Last year, 750 teams from 250 colleges in India came in with nominations.

bharatk@thehindu.co.in

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