Tech students win at Microsoft Imagine Cup

If you're a Computer Science major at Tech, one of the first things drilled into your head is that Microsoft is bad and open-source distribution software is good. But two graduate students from the College of Computing would beg to differ: not only are they passionate about Microsoft technology, they demonstrated their passion by taking first place for their region at the Microsoft Imagine Cup Software Design Invitational last month.

Peter Pesti and John Gibby, first and second-year master's students in Computer Science respectively, developed and submitted a mobile location-based application called mGraffiti. This program allows users to store text messages at any point on a global map covered by Microsoft's Terra Server, creating virtual "hot spots" that can be accessed and read by other users.

"Originally, the purpose was just to [create] a fun thing for people to use with their PDA and to promote communication and sort of a sense of community between people that don't even know each other," Gibby said. "People will read other people's graffiti and communicate. You might read something that somebody left two years ago, and you sort of feel like you know that person a little bit."

Later, Gibby said, they realized it could have other uses, including keeping maintenance records for telephone and electrical companies or providing disaster assistance.

"[You can] use the hot spots in various geographic regions to.put notes about what needs to be done, what kind of needs people have, what kind of medical supplies need to be delivered to certain places," he said. "So the product is actually a framework for a lot of information sharing applications that are geographically based."

Microsoft Corp.'s U.S. National Imagine Cup Software Design Invitational is one of nine annual invitationals that call on students to develop advances in global technology using Microsoft software. The Software Design Invitational focuses on technologies that dissolve the boundaries between people through the use of Microsoft's .NET Framework and various web services.

The Software Design Invitational is separated into two rounds, with the regional finals in the morning and the national finals in the afternoon. Teams from all over the country received an all-expense-paid trip to Redmond, Wash., home of Microsoft headquarters, for the competition. The national winners will attend the world finals in Yokohama, Japan, in July.

Now in its third year, the Imagine Cup also includes invitationals in algorithms, information technology, office design, rendering, short film, technology business plan, visual gaming and web development.

Gibby and Pesti decided to enter the competition early last semester when Pesti heard about the Imagine Cup through a mailing list. The two were enrolled in a special topics class called Advanced Internet Application Development and saw an opportunity to make use of the material.

"We decided to go for the Imagine Cup and give it as a class project," Pesti said. "So, basically, [we] hit two birds with one stone."

The two stumbled onto the idea of a mapping application while cruising Microsoft and university research sites. They noticed that Microsoft had taken an interest in location-based services, an area of research that their advising professor informed them was particularly active. But developing the idea turned out to be the easy part.

"We started out blindfolded, because there are many elements of the project that we eventually used that we didn't know at first...if we could," Pesti said. For example, the team eventually acquired a laptop and four PDAs from the CoC, hardware that they hadn't originally planned on taking to the competition.

In addition, the team had to become proficient in several applications to make their project work. "This was done in C#...and Visual Studio 2003 and Windows Mobile 2003.and we were actually not familiar with any of these," Pesti said.

The team also had to figure out how to integrate GPS technology as well as images from Microsoft's Terra Server, which provides satellite imagery of much of the globe.

The entire project took three months, with the team working right up to the start of the competition. Although they were proud of their final project, Gibby and Pesti wish that they had had time to implement additional features.

"There are functionality enhancements that we could add, like searching through the database for key words, categorizing the hot spots in terms of restaurants or places to go hiking or whatever," Gibby said. "People could do a search or locate different kinds of graffiti through a hierarchy of hotspot types."

However, Pesti pointed out, they had a smaller team and a late start. Whereas most teams in the competition comprised three to four people working six to eight months in advance, the Tech team had only two people, who started in February.

"Our project was the one which provided the most results with the least effort," he said. "Also.we were the only team in the finals which gave the judges a real live demo system that they could mess around with, that they could try to break."

And for their accomplishments, they took first place in the Rocky Mountain regional (the team was grouped into another region to even out the distribution of teams in each region) and won a $1000 prize as well as qualifying for the national finals round that afternoon.

Furthermore, with graduation looming, the two have considered marketing their product to Microsoft.

"There are a couple of things to try. One is to try to sort of promote it with the Terra Server guys," Pesti said. With Microsoft and Google in heated competition over internet searching and satellite mapping, Pesti said that they might be able to offer Microsoft an edge. "[Microsoft] has Terra Server, but the web interface is pretty cumbersome, so that might be a point of entry for us to say, 'Okay, we have something similar to what Google has. Do you want to take it? Do you want to improve it?'"

Pesti also said that the judges recommended that the two talk with the MapPoint web service administrators. MapPoint is a programmable Microsoft web service that allows businesses to integrate location-based services into software applications.

For more information about the Imagine Cup and the Software Design Invitational go to imagine.thespoke.net or www.microsoft.com/presspass/events/imaginecup.