Young Innovators Bag Microsoft's Imagine Cup 2022 For Their Out Of The Box Ideas

Microsoft announced the India winners of Imagine Cup 2022 edition in the company's flagship challenge for students and young innovators. Imagine Cup is Microsoft's global student technology competition designed to empower students to apply cutting edge technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning and data analytics to solve some of the world's most critical social and sustainability problems. The 2022 India edition saw over 100 team entries from student innovators across the country, competing to solve global challenges across four categories: earth, education, health and lifestyle.

The winning innovations used artificial intelligence (AI) to make synthetic data generation accessible to medical researchers (Synthesize.AI) and create affordable digital classroom solutions for blind students and those with low vision (BlisCare). The panel of judges included eminent personalities like Anant Maheshwari, President, Microsoft India, Shradha Sharma, Founder and CEO at YourStory Media, Trupti Mukker, CEO, Whitehat Junior and Awais Ahmed, Founder and CEO, Pixxel.

'Young Innovators Using Technology For A Better Future'

While congratulating the winners, Anant Maheshwari said, "Imagine Cup is more than just a platform, it's a celebration of the vision and spirit of young innovators using tech to imagine a better future. India's Techade will rest on harnessing the power of our youth to innovate for India. It was truly inspiring to see the passion, collaboration and differentiated thinking of the Imagine Cup participants as they built something that matters to them. I wish our winning teams luck as they prepare for the global stage and continue to innovate for impact", the official press release mentioned. World champions of Imagine Cup 2022 will win USD 100,000, a Microsoft Azure grant and a mentorship opportunity with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.

What Were The Winning Projects?

On their 20th anniversary, the competition is designed to help students build skills together and inspire them to create positive change. BlisCare-Affordable assistive technology for blind students, which was one of the winning projects, is an edtech initiative that aims to provide affordable digital classroom solutions for blind students and those with low vision. Through a digital Braille display system (a Braille tablet), the solution can replicate in real-time any text or graphical diagram to standard Braille at an affordable cost, making content accessible to students with low vision.

The second winning project was Synthesize.AI, which makes synthetic data generation easier for medical researchers. Through the Synthesize.AI project, students from the G. H. Raisoni College of Engineering, Nagpur leveraged the power of generative models to develop a solution that can generate high fidelity medical image data that preserves patient privacy and can augment or replace real-world data. The team's aim was to make synthetic data generation accessible to medical researchers and institutions to help them develop more robust and truly global AI-based diagnostic models. Users can simply upload their data to their website which is analyzed before generating synthetic data from it.

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