Sligo students display their imagination in the Big Apple

NET RESULTS:A road safety project drove Team Hermes from IT Sligo to a memorable Microsoft Imagine Cup final

THE ICONIC yellow taxis crawl the city’s boulevards and byways; the huge billboards and screens on Times Square flash obnoxiously day and night; tourists pose next to the NYPD cops on their languid chestnut horses; and every imaginable form of humanity pulses through the walkways.

It’s New York, it’s summer, it’s stultifyingly hot, and the Big Apple is this week home to an obsessive and youthful focus on how technology can be used to combat some of the world’s toughest problems.

On Times Square, in the ballrooms and meeting rooms of the Marriott Marquis, more than 400 students from the age of 16 up, from 70 countries, write code, edit digital video and refine team presentations that could lead to cash rewards totalling $215,000 plus support to further develop projects as well as entrepreneurial skills.

Their projects target malaria, road traffic deaths, asthma, quadriplegia, blindness and sight impairment, crime, refugee management, cancer, education, language barriers, blood donation, disaster response and myriad other weighty issues.

This is the ninth Imagine Cup, the world’s largest technology competition which takes place each July. Microsoft started the challenge in 2003 with 2,000 registrants from 25 countries. This year, more than 350,000 students from 183 countries registered. This was refined through national competitions to just over 400 finalists who make their project pitches during the week before panels of international judges.

Every year, the theme for the competition is based on some aspect of solving global problems highlighted in the UN’s Millennium Development Goals (un.org/millenniumgoals).

The competition itself is quite brutal. The first round of eliminations last Saturday saw the 67 teams in the event’s showpiece competition, software design, slashed to just 18. And that is an increase on previous years, when the cut has gone to 12. With the competition continuing to grow year on year (25,000 more students entered this year than in 2010), it was apparently deemed better to expand the first cut to keep more teams in and heighten the competitive element, even though it means judges have more work.

The second round on Sunday, when students pitched their projects to a new set of judges, reduced those 18 to just six finalists, with fewer than one in 11 teams making it through.

Among them was Ireland’s feisty Team Hermes from IT Sligo – students Matthew Padden, Áine Conaghan, Calum Cawley and James McNamara, led by academic mentor Pádraig Harte.

They have a device that plugs into the dashboard of any car built after 2000 and monitors driving safety, beeping to let the driver know when driving is becoming riskier. At the end of a trip, data is uploaded to the cloud and a driver – or the driver’s parent or boss – can view a dashboard of statistics and maps for the journey. This will show exactly where driving behaviour was riskier on a stretch of road and why.

Tips are offered on how to improve the problem element of the journey, and a score is assigned.

Road deaths are the biggest worldwide cause of death to those 14-25 after HIV-Aids and are considered by the UN to therefore be a serious impediment to reaching the millennium goals.

Insurance companies in Ireland are showing interest in the device, which could be used to reward drivers with lower premiums.

The competition judges also showed interest in each round, as the team made its polished presentation and answered questions.

Making the final six is an incredible achievement in this extremely tough and gruelling competition. As Microsoft executives – including chief executive Steve Ballmer, who opened the competition to a pandemonium of cheering – stress, just getting to the finals of the competition indicates that these students are the best of the best in their individual countries.

For the competitors, such sentiments, while laudable, are small consolation. Just getting here is not enough. They want to win. I’ve sat through this competition four times and watched several Irish teams go through the agony and disappointment of being ejected in the first and second rounds. They are always devastated.

In the five years that Ireland has participated in the cup, this is the second time an Irish team has made the final six. That alone is truly extraordinary – each time, the team has been entirely new to the competition, whereas many of the final six each year have been to at least one Imagine Cup before and have honed their projects accordingly.

The first Irish team, back in 2007, hailed from NUI Maynooth. It didn’t place at the finals in South Korea but won a special business accelerator award that saw them go to Silicon Valley and undergo a professional and intensive mentoring programme at Stanford University. But even that was, at the time, a let-down for a team that so badly wanted a spot in the top three.

And even then, a second or third placing would have been a let-down when what everyone here really wants is the silver cup.

On Wednesday evening, Team Hermes waited on knife edge for over two hours, as other category winners were announced. Finally, came the software design category. Third place: Jordan. Second place: the USA.

It was all now, or nothing.

It was . . . all. The Irish team dashed jubilantly to the stage carrying a giant Tricolour: first place in one of the toughest student technology competitions in the world. The audience in New York’s historic Koch Theater in the Lincoln Centre erupted – this was a popular choice.