A software application created by two UCA students to track the speed of a skin lesion’s progression to better diagnose and treat skin cancer is among the software designs selected to compete in the U.S. finals of the Imagine Cup.
The Imagine Cup is the world’s premier student technology competition sponsored and hosted by Microsoft. More than 200,000 teams from over 100 countries participate in the annual international competition.
UCA Ursus Team is among the top five teams competing in the first round of the U.S. finals scheduled in April at the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Washington. Team members are sophomore Brendan Lee of Alma and Muhyeddin Ercan, an international graduate student from Turkey. Sinan Kockara, assistant professor of the Computer Science Department, serves as team mentor.
The UCA team will compete in the Software Design category. Other teams in this category include Brigham Young University, Arizona State University, and the University of California – Los Angeles. The teams created real-world software applications using Microsoft technologies. The software applications addressed the Imagine Cup 2011 theme: Imagine a world where technology helps solve the toughest problems.
This is the first time UCA Ursus Team has competed in Imagine Cup. The team’s success was not a surprise, said Kockara.
“Our students learn to find creative solutions to real-world problems. Thus, they become one of the technology leaders of tomorrow,” he explained. “Students in our computer science program have access to a variety of hands-on research projects with outstanding faculty, such as biomedical informatics, multimedia, interval computing, networking, data mining, and software engineering. Achievements, such as the Imagine Cup, prove that UCA has a nationally competitive undergraduate program as well as a graduate program in Applied Computing.”
The Imagine Cup 2011 Worldwide Finals will be held in July in New York City. The grand prize is $8,000.