Team ProTag from New Zealand and Team Threeotech from Thailand from Asia advance to Microsoft’s Imagine Cup World Championships in May

SINGAPORE – Media OutReach – 5 April 2021 –
Microsoft
today announced the top
4 World Finalists of the 2021 Imagine Cup competition, including
2 teams from Asia, Team ProTag (New Zealand)
winning the Earth category and Team Threeotech (Thailand) emerging
top in the Lifestyle category. This was following an exciting two rounds of the
World Finals where 12 shortlisted teams gave a 3-minute project pitch followed
by a Q&A session with judges to compete for a spot in the World
Championships in May.

This
year’s 2021 Imagine Cup virtual competition saw tens of thousands of teams from
163 countries using innovative technologies, like AI, Power Platform, and Big
Data to develop their ideas into impactful and inspiring technological
solutions that make a difference. World Finalists had to submit innovations in
one of the four competition categories: Earth, Education, Healthcare, and Lifestyle. 

All
four World finalists impressed the judges with their innovative ideas, pushing
the envelope on the possibilities of improving our society as well as creating
a brighter and inclusive future for all. From Asia, under the Lifestyle
category, Team Threeotech developed a solution, “JustSigns”, a web
application for content creators to create sign language captions to improve
media accessibility for their hearing-impaired viewers. In the Earth category, Team
ProTag created a solution, “ProTag”, a smart ear tag for livestock that
uses technologies like mixed reality, IoT and Azure to detect the early onset
of illness in real-time. This is part of efforts to inculcate sustainable
farming, lower costs and increase animal welfare along with providing farmers
with a peace of mind. Both teams from Asia will be competing alongside two
other teams from Kenya and United States for the Imagine Cup World
Championships trophy in May, along with USD75,000 and a mentoring session with
Satya Nadella, Chief Executive Officer, Microsoft Corp. 

 

Other teams from Asia that
participated in the World Finals Competition include:

• Team Intelli-Sense (India): Under
  the Healthcare category, Intelli-sense developed a solution, “Vision” that seeks
  to leverage cutting-edge technologies, to provide a sense of vision for the
  visually impaired by providing solutions to help them perceive their
  surrounding in real-time.
• Team DataMasker (China): Under
  the Lifestyle category, DataMasker developed a solution, “WellMask”, an
  Artificial Intelligence social mask built to enhance social interaction. It is
  integrated with technologies to support “real-time speech transcription”, “intention
  extraction” and “emotion recognition”.
• Team
  Virtual Radiologist (Nepal): Under
  the Earth category, Virtual Radiologist developed a solution, “Pico Sat”, a
  miniature version of an environmental satellite that utilizes the Azure
  platform and PowerBI. It aims to provide information about your environment -
  altitude, temperature, humidity, pressure, dust and pressure level of present
  time – be it a small room or open space or betterment of Earth’s climate.

Held
annually since 2003, the Microsoft Imagine Cup is the world’s premier student
technology competition, affectionately known by participants as the “Olympics
of student technology competitions”. This year’s Imagine Cup encouraged
participants to “Dream it. Build it. Live it” in order to create applications
that shape how individuals live, work and play and through their creativity,
passion and knowledge of technology. For more information about Imagine Cup,
please visit https://www.imaginecup.com/.