As mentioned earlier, I was a judge for the nationals for Imagine Cup USA. The 1st place winner - which received $8,000 and an all-expense paid trip to Brazil to compete in the international competitions - was the team from UCLA working on Project PICKS, a “digital concierge” service. The concierge service could make recommendations for restaurants, shops, and entertainment based on a number of factors, such as the person's current geographical location, what activity they were interested in performing (going on a date, hanging out with friends, going on a business lunch, etc.), and their personality and age.
The second place winners, which took home $4,000, were from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. This team developed a system geared toward adaptive learning in a digital classroom. Two teams tied for third-place: a University of Illinois - Urbana Champaign team of one that designed a very usable Web services interface to LDAP, and a team from Arizona State University that created a system to better the lives of blind and visually impaired individuals by creating an interactive, mobile device that allowed the user to seemlessly interact with their environment through Web services.
For more information on the results, check out the official Imagine Cup US Nationals press release.
All in all, the presentations were wonderful, and there was obviously a lot of hard work put into the nine projects that made it to the nationals. It was an honor to serve as a judge at this competition and am positive the UCLA team will have an awesome showing at the internationals in July. Go Team USA! :-)
Tomorrow I'll be blogging from TechEd. I plan on taking the digital camera and showing to the world my complete lack of photojournalism skills.