Mumbai team runner up in Microsoft campus challenge

NEW DELHI: Microsoft announced the four winning teams of the 2003 Asia Pacific Student .NET competition.

The four winning teams from Singapore, Taiwan, the People's Republic of China and India were awarded their prizes by Bill Gates, Chairman and Chief Software Architect of Microsoft Corporation, during the Next Generation Technology Forum held on February 27 in Beijing, China, where over 8,000 students and developers were in attendance.

This year's competition attracted about 15,000 students who participated through almost 3,000 teams, representing eleven Asia Pacific countries and territories. Twelve top student teams were then selected to compete in the Asia Pacific Student .NET Competition 2003 finale, held in Beijing on February 26. Each team was tasked to develop an original design of XML Web Services Application using the award winning .NET Framework and Visual Studio .NET.

The team - Tejas Shah, Abhijeet Akhawe, Yash Doshi (Electronics Engineering, 3rd Year) -submitted a software solution for the healthcare industry to empower doctors and surgeons to diagnose and treat patients more efficiently.

The judging panel of the Beijing finale included Professor Narayanaswamy Balakrishnan of the India Institute of Science, Associate Professor Min Duk Gi of Konkuk University (Korea), Professor Zhong Chen of Peking University (PRC), Hanny Santoso of Bina Nusantara University (Indonesia) and Colin Png, Regional Director, .NET and Developers, Microsoft Asia Pacific and Greater China.

Students from all four winning teams would be invited free of charge to attend the upcoming Microsoft TechEd Conference in Barcelona, Spain, from June 30 to July 4, 2003, and they would be able to participate to the first Worldwide Student .NET Competition.

The 2003 Asia Pacific .NET Competition was organized by Microsoft with the official sponsorship of Acer Corporation, Legend Computer, and CNC.