02 March, 2014

A team of 4 students from the Departments of Computing and Business are heading to Dublin on Tuesday March 4th to represent CIT in the Microsoft Imagine Cup 2014, Ireland National Finals, having made it through the initial selection process. The Imagine Cup is an annual competition sponsored and hosted by Microsoft, comprised of 5 technology competitions, bringing together young technologists with the theme “Imagine a world where technology helps solve the toughest problems”. In 2011, there were more than 358,000 competitors representing 183 countries.

CIT’s Robert Gabriel and Rokas Lukosevicus (2nd year, BSc in Web Development), Libor Kampas (second year, BSc in Software Development) and Matthew Donovan (1st year, Bachelor in Business Information Systems) have developed a rendering engine, called Falcon, that resizes/recodes media files to make them more accessible to users with low bandwidth or capped download. Users access the service through a new search engine, with the video that got the team to the national finals available on YouTube.

If successful in the national finals a mentor from Microsoft will help the team to further develop their project, bringing it to the online world semi-finals in May, with the world finals to be held in Seattle in July of this year. The team have been supported by CIT staff members Jonathan Sherwin, Linda O’Sullivan, Gary Couse (Department of Computing), Dr. Regina O’Flynn and Joey Campbell.

Best of luck to the team in Microsoft Building 3 next Tuesday!