Environmental Embeddedness
Microsoft Challenges Students Skills

Deep in a remote Romanian forest, a crime is about to be committed. Far from the watchful eyes of the authorities, illegal loggers fire up their chainsaws and prepare to devastate an environmentally sensitive area, making off with the loot from black market lumber sales. The scene is played out constantly around the globe as deforestation claims the bounty of one of the world's most important natural resources – all in the name of ill-gotten booty.

This time, however, something is different. High up in the trees, discreetly mounted sensor boxes process the sound of the chainsaws and realize that something is amiss. A warning is sent down a Bluetooth network to a central processing unit that evaluates the threat. The Forest Condition (FCON) status is immediately raised to red - level 1 (the highest level). Multiple theft threats have been detected in the monitoring perimeter. A message is sent to the authorities who track the situation with Pocket PCs equipped with GPS and Bluetooth modules. Within minutes, the thieves are apprehended.

The low cost sensor and monitoring network that helped bag the bad guys can police vast forest areas for a tiny fraction of the cost of deploying human guards. Such a system makes protecting millions of acres of endangered forest much more feasible, offering new hope to curb an environmentally crippling crime.

Thousands of miles away, an endangered Blue Heron dives to catch a fish in a small pond. Unfortunately, the pond she has chosen is part of a commercial aquaculture enterprise, and the fish she's eyeing for dinner is an expensive exotic Koi. Fortunately, a video camera captures the scene, and an embedded processor performs a quick image analysis identifying the predator. In less than a second, speakers burst forth with a variety of annoying sounds designed to frighten the bird away. If these are unsuccessful, an array of water sprinklers will be triggered, sending the rare bird away for more appropriate dining venues and protecting the aquaculture venture from an expensive loss.

In the past, a frustrated fish farmer might have spotted and killed the bird, assuming that no environmental agencies were watching, hoping to protect his business from expensive losses. With the embedded technology of the intelligent scarecrow, however, both the bird and the exotic fish can be protected at a relatively low cost. Because of the image processing capabilities, the aquaculturist can visit the pond wearing an orange vest and the system will recognize him and refrain from repelling him with a dousing from the sprinklers. Previous generation systems that used only motion detectors would activate more indiscriminately.

These systems are just two examples of student-designed entries in a Microsoft-sponsored embedded systems design competition. In an age where most design competitions are sponsored by government-connected agencies interested in creating new and innovative ways to kill people, Microsoft's challenge to students to apply their technical know-how to protecting the environment is refreshing indeed.

The two examples above were first and second place winners in Microsoft's annual Windows Embedded Student ChallengE subtitled "Preserving, Protecting, and Enhancing the Environment." The winners were chosen from 360 entries from 13 countries who battled for top honors in the highly-competitive event. Besides the competition, teams faced almost unbelievable schedule pressure, taking their projects from initial idea to finished presentation between January and June, 2006.

Beginning with a call-for-entries in January that resulted in 360 submissions, the field was culled to 200 teams in February. Each of those teams received a development kit consisting of an eBox II, a development copy of WindowsCE, and a support connection to Micosoft's embedded developer support group. Besides generating some serious creative credentials for the savvy students involved, the contest illustrated the productivity of the Microsoft development environment for embedded systems as the teams were able to start essentially from zero and produce complex working systems in less than six months.

"Today's students are tomorrow's engineers," says Jane Gilson, director of the Mobile and Embedded Devices Division at Microsoft. "This competition unleashes the creativity in students, allowing them to compete on a worldwide basis with people that don't speak the same language." The educational value of the contest, including technological learning, environmental awareness, cultural understanding, business savvy, and teamwork and planning skills seems obvious.

Of the 200 teams that embarked on actual development, thirty were selected to travel to Redmond, Washington for the final showdown on June 24. For many of these teams, the journey to the Mecca of software development was their first opportunity to leave their own home country, state, or city. The presentations included descriptions of the environmental problems being addressed, detailed explanations of the workings of the embedded systems created by the team, project plans and schedules, and business models to prove the economic feasibility of the final product.

The creativity exemplified by the winners and runners-up is extraordinary indeed. The ideas represented by student projects ranged from preventing forest fires and detecting illegal logging to improving energy efficiency in automobiles to detecting hazardous mining conditions. Students were challenged not only with creativity in application and original design, but also in their ability to make a compelling presentation with feasibility arguments and examples of good teamwork.

The top five teams were (in order):

First Place: "44 Tech" from Politehnica University of Bucharest - Romania
Team Members: Cristian Iuliu Pop, Ioana Romelia Bratie, Omar Salim Choudary, and Mircea Dan Gheorghe
Project: "A monitoring system for preventing forest devastation (i.e, floods, fires, illegal logging)

Second Place: "Erebus" from University of South Florida – USA
Team Members: Albert Ng, Jimal Ramsamooj, Francisco Blanquicet, Scott Werner
Project: "An intelligent system to reduce eradication of protected and rare birds in fish farms"

Third Place: "Stars" from Xidian University – China
Team Members: Mingming Cheng, Ling Qiu, Wenbo Li, Shaofu Zhang
Project: "A system designed to conserve electricity through controlled street lamp lighting"

Fourth Place: "The Release Candidates" from Politehnica University of Bucharest – Romania
Team Members: Alin Iulian Lazar, Andrei Gheorghe, Mihai George, Ciureanu, Radu Nedelcut
Project: "A system for identifying and classifying bird species"

Fifth Place: "Buptunited" from Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications – China
Team Members: Xingrui Ji, Yi Shi, Lei Wang, Chenpeng Hu
Project: "An A1 coal mine enhancing system"

More information (including full reports from the winning projects) is available at: http://www.windowschallenge.com/winners_2006.aspx

Kevin Morris, Embedded Technology Journal

July 4, 2006

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