In the profound words of many a wise man, imagination is everything. Imagination is the preview of life’s coming attractions, as Albert Einstein mused. Imagination, Carl Sagan once said, will often carry us to worlds that never were, but without it we go nowhere.
Imagination might be more important than knowledge but when the twain meets in the bubbling mental laboratories of the restless young, the ever-expandable realm of technology often gets pushed in new directions, pulled into new dimensions, bringing to the world a piece of innovation that greatly enhances life itself. This quest, much like imagination, is limitless.
Fourteen years since it unlocked the global floodgates of youth ingenuity, Microsoft Imagine Cup continues to draw the finest talents in what is the American tech giant’s premier student technology programme and competition. This annual congregation unspooled in full force at the Imagine Cup 2016 Pan Arab Semi-Finals, held in Cairo recently.
Bringing a glorious end to a months-long series of contests at national level, the Pan Arab Semi-Finals hosted a record 150 students in 37 teams, representing 13 Arab countries. In a hard-fought contest that brought out some exciting and path-breaking bursts of student innovation, Team Basilisk from Tunisia, Team Night’s Watch from Tunisia, and Team Vanguards from Bahrain triumphed the Innovation, World Citizenship, and Games categories, respectively, earning them the chance to head to Seattle to represent the Arab World at the 14th Imagine Cup World Finals in July.
Understandably, the atmosphere at the awards ceremony at The American University of Cairo was charged — flags waving, fists pumping, some students sobbing, some jumping. In the 24 hours up until then, the throng had given it their all. In a haze of presentations, demos, and showcasing of their creations to an inquisitive jury, teams of up to four students had put out their original technology project in anxious excitement.
The Imagine Cup presents a chance for student technologists, developers and aspiring entrepreneurs from all academic backgrounds to collaborate, develop a technology application, create a business plan and gain an understanding of what is needed to bring a concept to market — and the three winners knew just how precious such exposure is.
“This is beyond amazing,” Ghassen Ferchichi of Team Basilisk from Tunisia that won the Innovation category with their ingenious creation, ProtectMe — pressure-sensing insoles designed for diabetics at the risk of foot or toe amputations — told Community moments after he and his team burst into a flurry of leaps, jumps, shouts and hugs, and returned from the stage nearly in tears, “To be able to present our innovation in Seattle is a massive boost for us. Merely the thought of how many lives would change for the better if we get to develop this product makes us so happy.”
Based on pressure and shear sensing technology, ProtectMe insoles contain transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulators that send electrical pulses through the skin of diabetes patients. These pulses control pain signals in the body, creating temporary or permanent relief from pain.
“Since some diabetic patients lose sensitivity and develop ulcers that can lead to amputation of the toe or foot, ProtectMe’s micro-sensors measure pressure and shear forces on the defective part of the sole of the foot, relaying information wirelessly and thereby avoiding aggravation of ulcers. This real-time analytics on movements detected by ProtectMe insoles are sent to the patient’s smart phone via Bluetooth. The best part is that these insoles are designed for convenient daily use as they fit into any shoes,” Ferchichi says.
Interestingly, the inspiration for this innovation came from a personal space for Team Basilisk. Sabrine Sassi and Kaouther Oueslati, also of Basilisk, said, “Back in Tunisia, most of our or our friends’ grandparents suffer from diabetes and the subsequent loss of sensation in the feet. Some had to even get their feet amputated. We felt compelled to find a solution to this rampant problem.”  
Team Night’s Watch from Tunisia clinched the World Citizenship category with Smart Hand, a prosthetic hand for those who have lost one or more of their limbs. Combining the forces of a Myo gesture control armband, which reads the muscle activity in the forearm, and a phone app, Smart Hand allows the user to programme his hand using the app — this means the user can grab objects, shake hands and even use a mouse on a PC. Soumaya Tekaya of the team said, “In Seattle, we hope to gain more experience while sharing our own strengths. We plan to use what we have learnt to continue to find ways to change our lives and the lives of the people in the world around us.”
The Games category, too, had a variety of cool entries — from the Algerian team Xerise’s Kyo: Dark Request, featuring a ninja chasing his lost memories in a moody B&W world, to Jordanian team Fayer’s simple yet engaging Rollet which is all about a Rolling-Rocket that needs to be manoeuvred through pitfalls.
But it was Apollo-X, a game devised by the Bahraini team Vanguards that took the trophy for its clever spin on the horror game genre. Using virtual reality, biofeedback technology and a mobile phone, the adaptive game changes according to the player’s heart rate. “So the more scared you get, the scarier the game becomes,” the team told the judges in their presentation.
Ali Faramawy, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Corporation and President, Microsoft Middle East & Africa (MEA), found “a real balance of technical strength and business model validity” in the teams of this year’s edition. Faramawy said, “We were pleased to see the teams innovating across Microsoft’s platforms and building solutions that enable people to do and achieve more through technology. The high quality of the projects we have seen from all participants indicates that many of them could be the start of real businesses that have the potential to contribute to the region’s prosperity.”
One of the most striking sub-plots of the Pan-Arab Semis was the heartening rise of Arab women as participants and innovators — 23 per cent of the participants were women. From Saudi Arabia’s Wijdan Moussa and Raniyah Almalki presenting OOPVisual that demystifies coding for the layman, to Palestine’s Malak Baghdadi who designed a video game Manara around the historical sites lining her hometown Nablus, there were several instances of lady tech geniuses coming to the fore. Microsoft throwing in #MakeWhatsNext, a two-hour-long session on women leadership in technology only further highlighted this welcome trend.
While spearheading such an innovation behemoth has earned Microsoft invaluable goodwill over time, the involvement of around 1.8 million students from more than 190 countries over the past 14 years with the Imagine Cup programme has meant that the outcome of this initiative is now witnessing major triumphs in the real world.
Amintas Lopes Neto, Technical Audiences Business Development Director, Microsoft Middle East and Africa, explained this phenomenon to Community, “Several Imagine Cup competitors who started their own business are very successful today. Mobile gaming company Gamsole, which represented Nigeria in the World Finals, employ more than 40 people today and have notched more than a million downloads. Another instance is of a Bahraini team that combined hardware and software to create Nail Polish Mixer, a solution to automatise nail polishing and also create custom nail polish colours on the fly. They, too, started a company and are now monetising the product.”
Neto points out the entrepreneurship side to the competition, and also the skills set development side, where Microsoft, he says, ensures students get all the experience and also good jobs. “This opportunity to interact with other friends and people who might invite you to their countries, or with who you might form new components in the future, is the way I see Imagine Cup playing an important role,” Neto said.
That said; is there any way that Microsoft seeks to monetise the creative yield of Imagine Cup? “We don’t harbour any intention to monetise the Imagine Cup. Sometimes, people ask us who owns the IPs of all these projects. The answer is that the IPs belong to the students as they develop their own ideas. Sometimes a student comes up and asks — how do we know that Microsoft won’t steal our idea?” Neto said and smiled.
“For us, the most important thing is to create a platform,” he continued, “We see Microsoft as an enabler. For us, the investment is more about improving our connection with the technical expertise and providing the best experience for the students with the company. There’s no other competition that has been going on for 14 years like Imagine Cup. We keep investing and the idea is to pave the way for new entrepreneurs to come up with innovative ideas on our platform.”
Neto says his dream is to review “the next Microsoft”. “That’s because if we help our students create another big company,” he said, “just imagine the impact we can have on the ecosystem and with jobs generation and opportunities.”