Microsoft announces winning apps for Imagine Cup Singapore

Microsoft Singapore has announced the three student teams from Nanyang Polytechnic (NYP) and the National University of Singapore (NUS) which have clinched the top spots for this year’s Imagine Cup Singapore finals.

Team STAND, comprising members from the NYP School of IT and NUS, took home the championship in the Innovation Competition with facial recognition software that runs on Microsoft software and the Microsoft cloud. The Face Analyzer for Crowd Emotions (FACE) app runs on any standard PC with a camera input device, and is capable of automatically identifying the age, race, gender and emotion of any audience member in a crowd in real time. 

Team STAND. From left: Arnaud Bonzom, Assistant Director, Career Development Centre, Entrepreneurship, SMEs, Social Impact, and Technology, INSEAD; Mong Yun Heng, NUS; Lai Zhiyuan, NYP; Goh Jun Jie, NYP; Chia Yong Xiang, NYP; Jessica Tan, Managing Director, Microsoft Singapore, and Tiam Yang, Founder, Tyler Projects. Bonzom, Tan and Tiam were some of the judges for Imagine Cup Singapore.

FACE has many potential applications—including but not limited to early childhood education and television show rating enforcement—and has already garnered endorsements from organisations such as School of the Arts (SOTA), Tanglin Trust School and Starhub.

Team Elites from the NYP School of Engineering won the World Citizenship Competition with project iHEARD, a Windows Phone-based solution that aims to help people with hearing and speech impairments to communicate better with those around them. Features such as speech synthesis and speech recognition enable these people to engage in phone calls, conversation and listening to audio content from many multimedia sources in a cost-effective, portable, and user-friendly package.

In the Games Competition, the NYP School of IT’s Team LifeChoices impressed judges with a role-playing game that is also called LifeChoices. The game lets players simulate making life-changing decisions, and an original, self-built game engine randomises gameplay scenarios based on the choices players make.

All three teams will now proceed to the World Semifinals to vie for the honour of representing Singapore in the World Finals, which will be held in Microsoft's home city of Redmond, Washington, in the US from July 29 to August 2. The three teams from the Asia Pacific region chosen at the World Semifinals to proceed to the World Finals will be announced on May 28. 

Judges were impressed with this year's crop of submissions. “This year’s student teams showed a great amount of maturity and inventiveness in their thinking, and really impressed us with their Imagine Cup projects,” said Nobuhiro Ito, Developer & Platform Evangelism Lead, Microsoft Singapore. 

Said Arnaud Bonzom, who advises MBA students and alumni on entrepreneurship in Asia-Pacific at the graduate business school INSEAD, “Imagine Cup never fails to showcase how much talent we have in the young students in Singapore, and it serves as a reminder that innovation is never restricted to any age group. I was particularly impressed with Team Elites and their project that aims to help people with hearing and speech impediments, as it is an excellent example of using technology for social impact.”

Jessica Tan, Managing Director, Microsoft Singapore, added, “In a time where innovation is prized, the Imagine Cup is a software competition that provides a platform for students to bring their best ideas, leveraging technology and working together to showcase solutions that will drive positive change in our community.”

Held annually since 2003, Imagine Cup is a global student technology competition that creates opportunities for students to learn how to launch a business and bring ideas to market, inspiring students around the world to innovate across all of Microsoft’s technology platforms and change our world for the better.