A musical soundbeam programme is representing Ireland in Poland at the Microsoft Imagine Cup in two weeks, writes KARLIN LILLINGTON
FOR SOMEBODY who hated maths in secondary school and wept when she didn’t get the points to do archaeology at university, Nikola Nevin is proof that students often find their real passion by accident. She “absolutely loves” her second choice of computer programming; now, her skills and creativity are about to pit her against some of the best computing students in the world.
The final-year computer science student at Dublin Institute of Technology heads to Poland in two weeks, representing Ireland in Microsoft’s Imagine Cup – one of the world’s largest technology competitions for university students. She and her team members will vie against finalists from countries across the world for the $250,000 (€202,000) in prizes on offer across five categories.
“I entered my application not even thinking I’d get in,” she says. “I had all these plans to start working for the summer, but all that has been put on hold now.”
Nevin and her team partner, DIT graduate student Marco Castorina, beat off stiff competition in the Irish finals of the Imagine Cup last April with their project, ImagineNote, a music-based physical therapy application that lets users control a computer by manipulating a beam of sound to convert body movements into images and music. “It makes music accessible to everyone, and helps people to make music together,” she says.
The project uses commercially available soundbeam technology – a device that sends out a sonar beam that can sense movement. Body movements in front of the beam can create different musical notes, while also controlling the computer screen, creating designs and images as well as music.
“The distance you are from the sound beam controls the beam. The whole point was to eliminate a game controller,” says Nevin, who plays the piano herself and was in her school orchestra. Music clearly runs in the family – her father is a drummer, and ImagineNote was partly inspired by her grandfather, who loves to play the guitar but can no longer do so because he has a hand tremor.
The sound beam can be set to mimic any musical instrument, allowing somebody with a physical disability to create music. Nevin also has a relative with a hearing disability, and thus came up with the idea of also having the beam produce visual effects.
While the initial intention of the project was to enable people to create images and music together, regardless of whether they have a physical disability or not, Nevin says the possibilities of how the sound beam technology could be used are limitless. There is a strong element of fun to the game, but ImagineNote could equally be used for teaching.
This was made clear to her and her team – which has expanded since the Irish final with the inclusion of fellow DIT students Philip Kavanagh and Jonathan Lynch – through their work with Enable Ireland and through testing of the device at Tyrrelstown National School. “It wouldn’t be half the game it is without their input,” Nevin says.
The children fired off ideas and, in particular, wanted to see something else besides a little bar on the screen that represents your position regarding the sound beam. “They said, ‘Why is it a little bar? Why not a car? Why can’t I have princesses?’ ” Nevin laughs. “So we’re working on making it more personalised.”
The Irish competition has become increasingly competitive since it kicked off four years ago, with entries more than trebling over that time to the more th an 600 received this year, according to Clare Dillon, head of Microsoft Ireland’s developers and platforms group.
Imagine Cup Ireland got a major boost in its first year, when the winning Irish team from Maynooth was a finalist in the centrepiece software competition, and a DIT team was a finalist in the web application design category at the Imagine Cup international final in South Korea.
The following year, in Paris, another team from Maynooth was a finalist in the embedded design category. These successes have given Ireland a good profile in the competition overall, says Dillon.
If finalist projects at national or international level have commercial potential, Microsoft and the partner companies support the teams to further develop their ideas. Not all winning teams are looking to produce an actual product, says Dillon, but the idea is explored and help is given, if warranted. Some of the international projects have gone on to a commercial launch.
In Ireland there has been a bigger effort to introduce professional guidance to promote entrepreneurialism and business skills for the winning teams. This year, the ImagineNote team will receive mentoring from Enterprise Ireland before it heads for Poland.
Dillon says one of the strengths of the competition is its humanitarian and social entrepreneurship focus, which sets it apart from more technical competitions. Each year the Imagine Cup has a theme around which students design their applications, websites and other digital media projects.
This move to a “bigger picture” is one of the major developments in the competition. In its first years, the competition was seen more as a technical challenge. “I think when it started there were lots of deeply technical solutions coming out of it. Now, it’s not just the technology but the problem that technology solves that is the issue. It’s about the application of technology, and it brings social entrepreneurship to students.”
Another change over the four years of the competition in Ireland is the increasing involvement of female computing students. A third of all entrants are now young women, says Dillon.
Nevin was one of only four female students alongside 89 males when she started her degree, but notes the number of women doing computer science has risen considerably since then. She admits she ended up in computer science “purely by a fluke”.
“After I got my [Leaving Cert] results, I cried that night because I wanted archaeology. I don’t really know why I decided to do computer science, but I absolutely loved it from day one.”
