UCEEG Team from University of Canberra with Brain Speller Project

At a tension-filled event at the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, last night the five Australian finalists in the 2011 Microsoft Imagine Cup fought for the coveted first place in the national Software Design category of the world's premier student research competition.

With the need for IT professionals growing exponentially across the world's industry sectors Debrincat said: "People don't realise that two thirds of IT professionals work outside the industry itself. Research use is accepted as easily as the oxygen we breathe and its uses and potential only need the fire of imagination."

Penny Coulter, Chairperson of the National ICT Careers Week Organising Committee, said: "The Microsoft Imagine Cup is the innovation equivalent of the Olympics. It is a very exciting avenue for raising the profile of the boundless training and professional career possibilities available in ICT."

The Microsoft Imagine Cup is the world's Premier Student Innovation Competition focused on finding solutions to real-world issues. The competition encourages the world's most talented software designers, programmers, to tackle, head on, issues related to: hunger relief, poverty, education, disease control, healthcare, the environment and other crucial problems facing our world.

The project is a social alert system that combines the mobility of smart phones, exposure of social networks, and the Internet to manage disaster information coming from people within or nearly disaster zones in real-time. It connects users to emergency services and their family and friends when they are within a disaster zone, allowing them to generate information that could help emergency services and governments ensure their safety and inform their friends and family of their safety status.

The team's application sends notifications about a catastrophe through SMS, e-mail, Facebook and Twitter and keeps people in the disaster zone and rescuers updated on the situation as it unfolds. An operator monitors the catastrophe, automatically notifying the mobile phones in the danger zone and sends them details on the path to safety. It can as well provide rescuers with real-time information, just as the safest way to get people out of the risk zone and updates on the victims' status.