Romanian students reach Microsoft technology contest finals

A three-student team from the Polytechnics University in Bucharest will participate this July in the world finals of the Microsoft Imagine Cup 2017 in Seattle, U.S. Last year, another Romanian team of students won the world finals of the same competition. The Romanian team that will participate in this year’s run of the competition is called deTpression and is made up of Vlad Niculescu, Alexandra Ciobica and Andrei Isac. They were mentored by Daniel Rosner, a lecturer at the Automatics and Computers Faculty at the Polytechnics University in Bucharest. He also mentored last year’s winning team. The deTpression team's project is a solution to detect and monitor depression using patient speech and image analysis. The patient needs to set up the deTpression device in their room. The resulting recordings are analyzed based on two algorithms. The collected data can be used to draw up statistics concerning the potential depression degree. The results are sent to the cloud, from where the family and the physician can access them, and monitor the patient. The Imagine Cup has been running since 2003. Imagine Cup National Finals competitions take place in dozens of countries all over the world. Organized by the Microsoft subsidiaries in those countries, the national finals select the best teams from each participating country as they pitch and demo their ideas to experts to gain a spot at the Imagine Cup World Finals. All world finalist teams win an all-expenses-paid trip to the World Finals, where they compete with the other teams from across the globe for the title of World Champion and a USD100,000 cash prize, according to a presentation of the event. editor@romania-insider.com (Photo source: Microsoft Imagine Facebook Page)