Students fuel innovation with parking system

NET RESULTS:IT'S THE typical modern headache – you drive into town, you'd like to find a parking space as close as possible to where you will be carrying back your shopping or attending an event, and you have no idea if you'll find a spot.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could get a text message telling you exactly how many spots are free right in the area where you wish to park? And if you could even get satellite navigation directions to bring you right to the location?

A team of students from Sligo Institute of Technology will be hoping the judges at Microsoft’s International Imagine Cup software design competition in Paris this summer will be thinking the same thing. The cup is the world’s largest technology competition for third-level students.

Cristina Maria Luminea and Kieran Stafford of team ParkIT won the Irish leg of the Imagine Cup last month in a hectic and intense day of presentations and demonstrations at Microsoft’s Dublin headquarters, where they faced off against 12 other Irish teams.

According to Microsoft academic engagement manager Liam Cronin, the live demonstration of the mobile application, using a small model of a car park and toy cars, is what clinched the win for ParkIT.

“At the Irish finals, they asked two of the judges to come on stage and take the cars and move them around and ‘park’ them. The other judge had a mobile. The system picked up which spaces had been left vacant when the cars were switched around and correctly texted that information to the other judge.”

Demonstrations of this sort are particularly important in the cup event as the teams at the international final will be partly judged on how well they sell their idea – a bit of showmanship did not go astray at last year’s finals in South Korea in August.

Wasn’t doing a live demo nerve-wrecking for ParkIT?

“It was a bit stressful at that moment, because we were depending on the light in the room being bright enough for the camera to see where the cars were,” says Luminea, a Romanian engineering and economics student. She initially went to Sligo as an Erasmus scholar, but liked it so much that she has returned to do her final year of study there.

But there had been a mini-crisis earlier in the day as well.

“We went in the day before the presentation to set up and everything was working perfectly,” she says.

“The next morning we went back in to check things and the camera wasn’t working.” Luckily, they’d had the presence of mind just before leaving Sligo to borrow an extra camera.

The idea for the project came from their faculty mentor, John Kelleher, who said that he’d been working on the basic idea after his own frustrations at finding parking spaces in Sligo.

“You tend to follow everyone around waiting for a space. And being a geek, I guess I had to figure out a way of solving the problem,” he says. Not only would such a system help people find parking more easily, it would also help ease congestion and save fuel, he believes.

Any surveillance camera can be used, including CCTV systems.

Available spots are reported to a central application, which then can respond to text queries and direct cars to an open place.

The team is likely to add another person or two because the intensity of the international competition is easier to manage with more people to share duties. They have until the end of May to fix a final team membership.

To date, Stafford has done most of the coding, while Luminea has done the research behind the application, but they’d like to get in someone with a strong business background to take on the research and marketing, freeing Luminea up to work on coding.

For the moment though, both Stafford and Luminea are primarily focusing on finishing their exams.

The Imagine Cup final this year falls in the second week of July, so they will dash in early summer to have a polished application and presentation ready.

Last year’s Maynooth team took home a coveted Innovation Accelerator prize from Seoul, and spent several weeks in Silicon Valley being coached by venture capitalists and successful entrepreneurs, so the pressure will be on ParkIT to perform well.

There are other Irish teams still in the running for the additional competitions that are part of the event, but it will be the end of this month before they will know if they are going to the final.

Best of luck to all and onwards to Paris!

klillington@irish-times.ie

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