now a story that is worth storing in this record. Few of my closest friends appear in this news that found place in Business Standard. The link is:
http://www.businessstandard.com/search/storypage_new.php?leftnm=lmnu9&leftindx=9&lselect=&autono=223225

But why shouldn't I simply copy it from the site itself and store it here forever... so here it is-


Microsoft selects Gujarat students for contest
Our Regional Bureau / Mumbai/ Ahmedabad April 21, 2006

During the Microsoft's Imagine Cup 2006 under the theme 'IT towards Health Care', three teams from Gujarat based institutes were picked up for the national contest to be held in Bangalore on April 24.

Of them, two teams are from Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology (DAIICT), Gandhinagar and one is from Sardar Vallabhbhai National Institute of Technology (SVNIT), Surat. All the selected students belong to TY B.tech and are between 19 to 21 years of age.

A team comprising of Parag Kulkarni, Tanushree Jindal and Vasudhara Kantroo, lead by Himanshu Pokhariya, all from DAIICT, designed 'The Navigator', a solution to support people with Cerebral Palsy.

"This will help patients navigate a computer and browse the web easily without having to resort to the use of specially designed hardware or special software or websites," said Pokhariya.

"Out of every 1,000 children, about two to four are born with Cerebral Palsy. We have designed such a remote control, with a combination of software and hardware, which works on the basis of sound produced by the patient," said Pokhariya adding that the patient would also be able to operate home appliances with the remote control.

"The cost of the device is less than Rs 3,000 apart from the cost of a standard PC," he added.

Similarly, the second team of Deepak Jagdish, Mohit Gupta, Shreyas Nangia and Rahul Sawhney from DAIICT are working on a solution called Sonique. "This solution aims to enable visually impaired people to achieve high quality access of day-to-day navigation scenarios and techniques," said Jagdish.

"Sonique will give them the ability to move around easily and in the process revolutionise their sense of mobility. The impact of the solution would be such that blind people can break the barriers of their restricted environment and attain total freedom of navigation," he added.

According to Mohit Gupta, they have made a prototype of Sonique which consists ultrasonic sensors connected to a pocket PC or PDA. "These sensors send and receive ultrasonic waves of the object and transfer it into micro controllers for processing," said Gupta. The output of the device will be the sounds processed in micro controllers through which a blind man would be able to virtually visualise the object at the maximum distance of five metre, he added.

The third team from SVNIT, opted out from the competition as the dates clashed with their final exams. "Our idea was to create a racing game where players across the globe could participate physically, intellectually or morally from one city to another," said Urvang Joshi, the team leader.

Sheela Gulati, director of Developer and Platform Evangelism, Microsoft India, said, "Imagine Cup is an annual contest held by Microsoft to help students from across the world to showcase their software development skills. The winners from the National Finals, will compete at the world championships in Agra, in August 2006 for cash prizes of $25,000."

She further said this is for first time that the international competition will take place in Agra where students of more than 181 countries will participate.
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At the moment, these guys are figting it out in Banglore. Its there D day, they had been preparing for which like crazy. No food, no sleep, no leisure (at least for some of them). Past 15-20 days were spent by them endlessly working on their projects. This extremely high degree of devotion was in itself very motivation to witness. I don't really think that people in IT industry ever work that hard once in the industry. These guys almost killed themselves.
Few slept for like 8-10 hours a week (yes, a week). A guy was spitting blood and still considered it normal. Another one got an asthmatic attack, of the worst possible type. This complete journey has been full of such incidents and memoirs...

And even after they come back, there will be no time to rest as we have our finals coming up from 4th of May.

Wish you guys all the very best and a good night sleep.