It all started with me getting a call from microsoft inviting me to come and watch the event which was to take place at Air force auditorium, Delhi. Frankly speaking i was not at all interested in going to watch the event as i knew that the projects would be build on .NET only and i don't like .NET at all. But then, the lady on the phone said the golden words. She said, "You are going to get a Free DVD of windows Vista for personal use, free lunch and tickets to watch the movie Spiderman 3". I was already planning to go and watch the movie the next day which incidentally was the release date (5 may 2007) of the movie and getting printed DVDs of windows Vista was also to my liking. So, i agreed to go to watch the event along with a few of my friends. I was in for a big surprise.
The first thing i noticed when i reached the venue was that the persons who were managing the event and were at the reception were pretty bad at management and things were haywire everywhere. Then, they didn't have my name on some kind of list they had. When i told them that i had got a call from microsoft to come and watch the event they said they knew nothing of that sort and i would not get the movie tickets. I would still get Windows Vista for which i would have to fill in a form. When i had a look on the form i realized that we were net getting any printed DVDs but instead i would get a userid which i can use to download it from microsoft's website. Aargh!! this sucks. I came in the hope that i would get printed DVDs and free spiderman tickets but instead i got none. I tried to console myself that atleast there was free lunch and knowledge to gain. Little did i know what was to come later.
The projects that were on display had some genuine good ideas although one can't say that they were really innovative but yes they were good. I would give a brief description of the top three. Remember that the theme of this years imagine cup was "Education for all" so all the project had to do something with education.
- Aabha: (3rd) This was supposed to be a integrated web based educational system with facilities has facilities for Multilingual Text Summarization, digital lecture board, online handwriting recognition and Speech to text and text to speech facilities. The text summarization part was really and maybe was the only reason the team got the third place. The rest of the things were pathetic jokes just using .NET frameworks apis and doing nothing more.
- eduGrid: (2nd, my pick) This project aimed to answer the what and why questions given a database and some collaboration using grid computing as the backend. Although not innovative in any way they were doing something of my interest and according to me going in the right direction.
- Recog: (1st) This project aimed to improve learning by clustering information and showing how these clusters correlate with each other and to what extent. Good idea but nothing innovative. I believe what was going on is a simple keyword matching going on to find to what extend the keywords match in between different clusters which were nothing clustered but simple data with certain key word defined. The only thing i believe which got them the first prize was their snappy GUI.
The teams had worked hard and i hope Team Recog wins the first prize in korea. Nothing against any team just my 2 cents :).
There was also initially a panel discussion on "What is required to spur innovation among indian students". This discussion was good and to the point.
Coming to lunch. The lunch was managed horribly. There were too many people and too few plates which had been arranged. There was no planning whatsoever. I had to wait half an hour for more plates to come. Total disappointment!!! :(
At the and there was too much commotion at the counter where we had to submit our completed forms to get the userids. Sigh, another example of bad management.
Final Toughts
Although the event on the whole was all right the management was horrible. Microsoft is a big company and can't afford to do such kind of mistakes especially when it is facing so much heat from the market already. This is in contrast to the world finals of 2006 which also happened in Delhi and i was fortunate enough to attend. The event was very, very well managed. And they had got beer there :D. Maybe they have some kind of prejudice against India. I went empty handed and came back empty handed. You might also think that i am greedy or something but then when you have the prospect of getting a $250 worth of software for free who isn't?
PS:It has been around 25 days and me and my friends are still waiting for the userids to come.