Sergiu Damian's Blog » imagine cup

România wins 2 Oscars @ Imagine Cup 2009 in Egypt

Sergiu — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 07:35:51 +0000

After years of participation, Romania finally marks the first prize in Software Design. It’s a great day for Sytech team from Iasi and for their mentor. Cosmin Ilie won the IT section with the highest score ever.

Congratulations to the team members, their mentors and the Microsoft Romania people who put their hearts and minds into it.

I hope this will be an impulse for others, I hope Sytech and Cosmin will share their winning tips and I want to see many others asking them how they did it. It must be repeatable!

More details on:

Imagine Cup official site
Valy Greavu’s Live Text Transmission
Dan Iancu’s blog

Imagine Cup 2009, Egypt – Romania is in the game

Sergiu — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 06:32:01 +0000

A while ago I blogged about the experience of being a member of the jury for the Software Design section of Imagine Cup in Romania. Sytech, the team that represents Romania in the Egypt finals prepared for us a nice present during last weekend. They qualified in the top 6, world wide. That’s the best result all-time for a Romanian team in this (section of the) competition. Congratulations!

Of course, as always, Valy Greavu has deep coverage, so follow his blog for details: http://itboard.ro/blogs/valys_blog/archive/2009/07/04/finala-imagine-cup-2009-it-challenge-live-text.aspx (Valy, thank you for being there and sharing)

Also, vote for the Romanian team here: http://peopleschoice.imaginecup.com/default.aspx (ignore the runtime error and come back later if you really want to vote).

Imagine Cup 2009, Software Design

Sergiu — Mon, 18 May 2009 12:50:18 +0000

Another year passed, one more Imagine Cup final. It was the Software Design section. Sytech team, from Iasi, was selected to represent Romania in the world competition finals, in Egypt. As students, the only competition we could attend was ACM. It was more theoretical. Nowadays, I believe students are overwhelmed by the countless possibilities to train, experience, participate in projects, competitions, internships and so on. You would say this is a good thing, that it’s normal. However, from behind the jury desk we see a different side of the story. We see it is still difficult for us to prepare a project that is ready for prime time. Maybe us, as Romanians, are not trained yet well enough in giving birth to great ideas, freeing our mind to think the impossible, but to make it possible. I hope next year I will be amazed. This year, we (the jury members) could only select which team was better than the others, but not which team was the winner.

Still, I believe that participating makes us better, so I hope all people present, including myself, will learn from the experience and will do better next time.

[Update]

For technical details about the competition, Valy’s blog has a thorough description of the teams, projects and criteria here.

Dan Iancu has put to use his great journalistic experience to pinpoint exactly the illness that we saw. I subscribe to his call to wake up. For a serious reading, go here.