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IT whiz kids dream up healthier realities

27 September 2006

Professor Christine Mingins with the winning Italian team in the 2006 Imagine Cup in Agra, India.

Software to help blind people navigate and a system to alert medical staff to people suffering panic attacks or other ailments were at the top of an international student software competition, judged by Monash Clayton School of Information Technology Head Professor Christine Mingins.

Professor Mingins was one of a select band of around 20 academics and IT professionals from around the world invited by Microsoft to judge the 2006 Imagine Cup, an ambitious worldwide software competition for students run by the company.

Close to 200 university students in 72 teams from 42 countries joined the judges for the final round of the competition that was held this year in Agra, India.

Professor Mingins said she was "totally inspired" by the event, which had begun with 65,000 students from more than 100 countries, who were asked to provide software applications across six categories to address the theme "imagine a world where technology enables us to lead healthier lives".

"If you can imagine teams from Slovenia, Tunisia, South Africa, Greece, Australia, Japan -- all these kids were mixing for five or six days and it was just amazing," said Professor Mingins, who was a judge in the Software Design category.

She said the winning team from Italy had adapted available monitoring technology to develop a system that automatically alerted a doctor or family member via an SMS message that someone was suffering a disorder, such as an anxiety attack, heart condition or memory disorder.

She was also impressed by the innovation of the second-placed team from Brazil, who invented a vibrating armband that could guide blind people along a programmed route and alert wearers to points of interest, such as a supermarket.

Professor Mingins said the winning team, comprised of psychology, IT, biology and design students, showed how a multidisciplinary team could bring the right talents to bear on a problem.

She plans to encourage students at Monash to form teams and develop projects for future competitions and to provide advice to those and other student groups through her own consultancy.

She says she also hopes to be asked to judge the finals again, which will be held next year in South Korea. "I hope I behaved myself well enough to get invited again next year," she said.