Two Irish teams have taken top prizes in computing at Microsoft's Imagine Cup, the world's largest annual technology competition for third-level students.
In the competition's centrepiece category of software design, a four-man team from NUI Maynooth were among three winners of a two-week BT/Microsoft Innovation Accelerator programme to receive in-depth business and technology training, after their project was deemed to have particularly innovative technology and commercialisation potential.
The four - Cathal Coffey from Kildare; Daniel Kelly from Donegal; Mark Clerkin from Monaghan; and Eric McClean from Meath - were also placed in the final shortlist of six teams out of 55 in the competition.
A second Irish team, Marouf Azad and Mohammed Al-Tahs from Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT), took second place and a $4,000 (€2,921) prize in the web development category.
The two DIT competitors arrived in Seoul as one of six finalist teams chosen from an initial field of 400. They faced off against the other five finalists in one of the most gruelling events of the cup, a 24-hour nonstop programming marathon from Monday to Tuesday.
Both teams accepted their awards draped in Tricolours provided for them by the Irish Embassy in Seoul, South Korea, this year's location for the final.
This is the first year the Republic has entered a team in the cup, which was launched by Microsoft in 2003 and includes competitions in programming, web development and digital arts.
Some 100,000 students initially registered for the competition. The final 112 teams that arrived in Seoul competed with projects on the theme, "Imagine a world where technology enables a better education for all", for prizes totalling $170,000.
The DIT team built a suite of technologies around their core project, an online code compiler for programmers that translates higher-level computer programming languages into instructions a machine can understand directly. Mohammed Al-Tahs said winning the second place award was "amazing. We had the confidence in our project but we knew it would be extremely difficult here."
