Bilkent Wins Third Prize at the Turkey Microsoft Imagine Cup Finals
On Friday, April 22, the Bilkent University team BMEKS consisting of the students Erkin Demirtaş, Saltuk Buğra Karakuzu, Göktuğ Kaan Şengül, and Merve Timurlenk, supervised by Dr. Bedir Tekinerdoğan from the Computer Engineering Department, took third prize at the Turkey Microsoft Imagine Cup Finals in istanbul.
The Imagine Cup is the world's premier student technology competition and is being organized for the ninth time this year. The Imagine Cup competition spans one year, beginning with local contests in over 100 countries/regions. The finalists of each country go on to attend the worldwide finals held in a different country every year, this year being organized in New York. The Turkey finals are held each year at the Microsoft Office in İstanbul. This year around 110 project teams participated in the Turkey Microsoft Turkey Imagine Cup contest, and six of these teams were selected for the finals in İstanbul.
The Microsoft Imagine Cup 2011 themes are derived from the United Nations Millennium Goals and aim to realize these goals by providing technological solutions. Human rights, such as freedom from hunger, the right to basic education, the right to health, and a responsibility to future generations, are among the key goals. Since most of these problems are global in nature, the Bilkent team aimed to solve these problems by focusing on global partnerships. A serious obstacle in setting up global partnership appears to be communication problems caused by different languages. Communication is the first step towards setting up a partnership, and if communication fails, sustainable partnerships will not be possible. The Bilkent team developed the system Livetouch, which provides online and simultaneous translation services for partners around the world. Using Livetouch, a person in Turkey, for example, can speak in Turkish with a global partner in Japan who gets the spoken messages directly translated in Japanese and who can reply in Japanese. Livetouch performs the translation automatically. Thus, using Livetouch global partners are not required to learn a new language or hire expensive interpreters to support global partnership. The Livetouch platform supports many different languages, and communication can be textual, audio, or video. The Bilkent team aims to further develop the system and look for industrial applications in the near future.
The Bilkent Software Engineering group (Bilsen) led by by Dr. Bedir Tekinerdogan aims to participate to the contest next year again with new teams.