It was an interesting day at NIMHANS Convention Center watching the teams giving presentations on their work. The subject was “sustainability”; of course, most of the teams had used “computing” as a tool (probably influenced by the sponsor being Microsoft).
Three teams wee selected from India; after training at IIMA for a while one team is to be selected to represent India in Imagine Cup 2008 Final in France.
Novices@Work that uses Sensor Network to monitor agriculture from Vivekananda Educational Society, Mumbai won the First Prize RS 40K)
SKAN that deals with power management tools to switch off PCs across corporate network from Bharti Vidyapeeth, Mumbai won the Second Prize Rs 20K)
Green Waves from Delhi University Computer Science won the Third Prize Rs 10K)
Microsoft Chairman Ravi Venkatesan gave away the prizes.
Lead India winner RK Mishra gave an inspiring speech; his key message “solving India’s problem using whatever tools is cool; Internet alone is not cool, though most students are from IT”
Kiran Karnik former NASSCOM President in his keynote address talked of the “envious” opportunities enjoyed by Indian students today; he talked of three differences in the environment (compared to his days) that makes Innovation accelerate in India today;
ability to innovate without the need for expensive equipment (thanks to widely available computers);
power of software to abstract complex problems;
power of Internet that allows any one to fine collaborators everywhere
There was an interesting panel discussion moderated by Rajdeep of NASSCOM with IIMA Director Barua, myself, Gopi from GE and Paul from Microsoft.
All in all it was a nice learning experience
