The team, from Bengaluru’s RV College of Engineering, won $15,000 cash prize and an additional $30,000 to fund their project
A three-member team from India won $15,000 and an award for designing an app that detects fake drugs.
Team DrugSafe's members – Srihari HS, Pratik Mohapatra and Chidroop I – are students of Bengaluru’s RV College of Engineering and they participated in the Microsoft Imagine Cup 2018 in Redmond, Washington. Their aim is to help people verify the authenticity of drugs in a world where counterfeit drugs are in global abundance.
According to a report by Business Standard, Microsoft said the app uses a technology called optical character recognition (OCR), which records the packaging and designs of store drugs and compares them with attributes that were patented by the original manufacturer. Following three levels of checks, it identifies the smallest of discrepancies and flags it, so that users can identify if a medicine is counterfeit.
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Team DrugSafe won the award under the Big Data category and, along with two others from the US and Nepal, received the $15,000 cash prize and an additional $30,000 to help fund their endeavour. Two other student teams from India reached the finals of the global event.
A Canadian team – Team smartARM – was the overall winner of the championship; it built a working Microsoft-Azure-powered robotic prosthetic hand. The prosthetic has a camera embedded into its palm in order to help identify objects and compute the most suitable grip for the object.
The team will receive $85,000 as cash prize, an Azure grant which is worth $50,000 and a tutoring session with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.
Greece’s team iCry2Talk came in second with a project that would allow parents to decipher what their baby’s crying means in real-time. The technology associates the baby’s cries with various psychological and physiological profiles and depicts the results through text, images and/or a voice message.
The third place went to Team Mediated Ear from Japan, which created a software to help people with hearing problems. Using deep learning, the software allows the user to focus on the voice of a specific speaker among a mass of other conversations.
The Microsoft Imagine Cup has been held annually since 2003 and sees participation from nearly 1.8 million students from over 190 countries. This year, 49 teams from 33 countries were chosen to travel to Redmond and visit Microsoft’s headquarters there to showcase their creations.