Indian student team wins the Microsofts Imagine Cup Egypt ‘09

A team of College of Engineering Pune from Class of '09 won the first prize of USD 5,000 for their project on Parallel Computing at the Imagine Cup Egypt ‘09. The prize money is around Rs 2,37,249 in Indian rupees.The Imagine Cup is billed as the ‘World's Premier Student Technology Competition' and is organised by Microsoft Corp. This year, there were more than 300,000 students that have registered to participate in Imagine Cup, and a few hundred of them have made it through to the worldwide finals in Cairo where they compete for prizes in nine different categories and a few additional special awards.

The Imagine Cup is one way Microsoft is encouraging young people to apply their imagination, their passion and their creativity to technology innovations that can make a difference in the world today.The competition is a challenge to youngsters to yoke their technology skills to work at solving some of the world's toughest problems. The ‘imagine' in the name comes from Microsoft's challenge "Imagine a world where technology helps solve the toughest problems facing us today".This was the seventh year of existence for the Imagine Cup and has grown to be a truly global competition focused on finding solutions to real world issues.

Here is the small History of the Microsofts Imagine Cup:-

In 2005, Russian students won the Software Design competitionIn 2006, Polish students won all three medals in the Algorithm categoryIn 2007, Polish teams captured 1st placeIn 2008, students from Central & Eastern Europe wonIn 2009, The Student Team from College of Engineering Pune won the first prize

Technology can be the force that transforms these great ideas into real world solutions. And that's the point of the Imagine Cup every year to use technology to make a difference.The Pune-based team named Biollel was placed first in the Parallel Computing section.The project, according to the team, reduces the computational time for phylogenetic tree construction by efficiently implementing them in parallel so that we get performance benefits on multi-core platforms.The Imagine Cup brought together more than 300,000 students from over 100 countries around the world where they compete to help find the answers.And no matter whatever happened, finally the winners are Students Team from Pune, India.