Cosmin Siclovan, Donal O’Sullivan and Marie Farrell from NUI Maynooth were crowned winners of the 10th Microsoft Imagine Cup 2012 yesterday. The students took top honours with a cloud-based application to provide a doctor/patient synchronisation system offering a personalised symptomatic journal with reminders for the patient and client management features to the medical professional.
Minister of State for Training and Skills Ciarán Cannon attended today’s finals. Speaking at the event the Minister said: "It is very encouraging to see so many students in Ireland interested in technology and in applying their knowledge in the area to come up with solutions to real world problems. Through their involvement in this competition they are showing an ability to combine technical knowledge with creativity and design – a skill that is highly desired and valued in today’s labour market."
Paul Rellis, managing director, Microsoft Ireland, said: "Last year students from Sligo won the competition with their solution to encourage safer driving. They went on to win the global finals and are now working towards commercialising their concept. This is the type of adoption of Cloud we need to encourage. Earlier this week we launched the Microsoft Amarach National Cloud Index which showed that 13% of those surveyed consider the availability of the right IT skills to be a barrier to Cloud adoption for their organisation. This shouldn’t be the case – the courses are now available, the jobs in the sector are coming on stream and the potential for companies to expand through leveraging the Cloud are enormous. Our students are setting the right example if todays’ competition is anything to go by. With a renewed focus on the sector I hope we can continue to develop this country into the Cloud Centre of Excellence it can be, and ensure these students have an environment they can prosper in."
The NUI Maynooth team will receive mentoring from Microsoft Ireland in the build up to the global finals in Sydney, Australia.
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