Microsoft Imagine Cup - The National Finals

Howdy Amigos !!
Sorry for the very long delay. The trio had been busy with a lot of stuff lately and none of them could take out a little time out of their "busy" and lazy lives to update my progress here. :( Anyway, here I am, to tell you some new stuff happening with me lately.
As described in my last post, I got into the National Finals of Microsoft Imagine Cup Embedded Development category.

The National Finals were held at Microsoft's Gurgaon office on 27th and 28th April, 2011. The trio flew to Gurgaon 1 day before the finals. As for the arrangements by Microsoft for their finalists, well, I can't complain. It was too good. We were given a room in Microsoft's Guest house, local transportation in Gurgaon from the guest house to their office and back, and from Gurgaon to New Delhi where the final presentation ceremony was held. The event was organised by Mr. Mark D'Souza and Mr. Aditya Mohan of Microsoft. 
Upon reaching the guest house, we met Mark. He stood out as a very friendly and helpful guy. He spent some time with all the 7 finalists, getting to know their projects and giving them tips for their presentations in front of the jury. The jury consisted of - 

• Prof. Anshul Kumar, IIT Delhi
• Mr. Prabu Kumar Kesavan, a Microsoft Windows Embedded Most Valuable Professional (eMVP) working with e-con Systems (http://www.e-consystems.com/)
• Mr. Tejas Shah, Competitive Strategy Manager, Microsoft India

We had to present the project in front of the jury in 20 minutes. The presentation went well, almost as it was planned (with a few hiccups maybe, but that is not really relevant). Then followed the judges' comments. They pointed out our inability to satisfactorily justify the project as an embedded project. Another point was the feasibility and practicality of the project. Comments like "how will you convince the govt. to let you tamper with the existing infrastructure to plant the LEDs", "Why do you say it's embedded? Why don't you use mainframe computers instead of an embedded CPU" etc etc... Though the trio tried its best to answer their questions, it was clear from the looks on the judges' faces that the answers were not very satisfactory. So, that Q-A round marked the end of the judging process.
The following day we had the final prize distribution ceremony and Open Showcase at the Siri Fort Auditorium in New Delhi. The trio was asked to give a short 3 minute elevator pitch about the project to the audience. They decided that Tarin would do it, and so he did. Fortunately we got the first spot for the pitch, so the audience was still fresh and they actually listened to him (unlike the following pitches which ultimately left audience yawning and chit-chatting). So, that went well too. Then followed the results. And guess what, I didn't make it to the top-3. :( Felt bad but it was justified considering how we almost bombed the Q-A round the previous day. 
So, that was pretty much it. Another big competition. Another finals. And yet another, no spot in the top-3. But I know the trio has progressed a lot since their last year's Intel IEC entry. The experience here at Microsoft was awesome. Go to know some more shortcomings in me which have to be worked upon. The trio got enough time and chances to talk to various technologists at Microsoft and they got some pretty valuable advice there. I am hopeful they will consider those advices and improve me for the next time. But wait, next time? What's next? Another competition? Well, the chances are less. I am not sure what's going on in their minds right now, but I get a feeling it's something big this time. Really big, bigger than these competitions. What is it? Stay tuned to find out in my next post. :) 
Adios.

void main ()

Howdy amigos!!
Hope you people enjoyed the curtain raiser. And if you didn't, maybe you are on the wrong blog. But if you know you are on the right blog, and still didn't enjoy it, just tag along. There's a lot more in stock for you.
So, this is the post where I officially introduce myself to you, answer the questions - "What exactly am I?", "Why exactly am I?", "What do I do?", et al. Drum roll and... let's begin.

In a developing country like India (where vast population and poor infrastructure come unasked for), it’s important for the emergency services to be efficient and always up on its toes. You can get your money back if the pizza boy doesn’t deliver in 30 minutes but you can’t get back a life lost waiting for the ambulance, nor can you get back your property ashed waiting for the fire truck which was stuck somewhere in the traffic.
During tragic circumstances, when you see someone near & dear to you writhing in pain in an ambulance stuck in heavy traffic, you wish there existed some system which could get the patient faster to the hospital through this traffic or when you see your property burning down to ashes because the fire engine couldn’t locate you in time, you wish there existed some system which could get it to your property fast enough to save it from complete annihilation.

Some news snippets supporting the above statements:

•  “Fire in Heritage Building kills six in Kolkata…..Onlookers say the main cause of deaths was that the fire engines arrived an hour late” ~ DNA India
• According to a research at Christian Medical College, Ludhiana, the most important factor in saving lives in road traffic accidents is pre hospitalization management which includes care in first one hour of the injury.
• Also one of the major causes of maternal deaths is that many women reach heath facilities too late and in such serious condition that medical interventions are not effective.

I aim at improving the existing methods for dispatching vehicles during times of emergency. The emergency services have been classified as follows:

1. Fire Brigade
2. Medical
3. Police

Presently in India, there are a lot of factors which cause a lag in the response of these services out of which the trio (my team) identified and extracted the three major factors which are explained below -

• Miscommunication : Where the emergency is and what is the (optimum) way to get there. For instance: Even in a big city like Mumbai, the contact number for police is 100. On dialling 100 the caller gets connected to the central hub. So for a person living in Panvel (a district in Mumbai), it is difficult to remember the contact number of the nearest police station in that area.
• Lack of co-ordination : There is no central area from which these services are deployed. Also all three of these services have different contact numbers which makes remembering all of them difficult. The ambulance (or any of the 3 emergency services for that matter) network in a city is not co-ordinated and for a medical emergency the ambulance may not be dispatched from the nearest possible centre.
• Traffic congestions : There are no dedicated lanes for emergency vehicles, so they have to share the road with common traffic and thus they get caught up in congestion which increases their response time considerably. Also the common vehicles can’t give way for the emergency vehicles due to lack of a timely prior warning.

Keeping all the above problems in mind, the trio devised me, a solution which aims at improving the current functioning of emergency services in India.

But how do I plan to improve this functioning? How do I work? How are they developing me? What are the hurdles they are facing? What are they doing about it? Can YOU help them? What do they need from YOU? and a lot more questions to be answered in my upcoming posts. Stay tuned.
Adios amigos!

#include "Hello World.h"

Howdy amigos!
Welcome to ColumbaPyxis Auriga's journal. Nice technical mystical name, huh? We'll come to it soon. To start with, I am an intelligent embedded system for quick response to city-wide emergency calls. Continue reading to know more about me -

My Birth :

It was October 2009. Two of my co-creators Tarin Bansal & Abhishek Jain, owing to their habit of late night discussions and shooting random (and most of the time, stupid) ideas were kicking around random thoughts for the Intel India Embedded Challenge 2010, whose poster they had seen earlier that day in the college. Both were in their second year at that time, with little experience on self-initiated technical projects and no idea whatsoever about embedded systems. Yet they both decided to give it a try and came up with this stupid (Yes, it sounded really stupid back then!) idea of lighting up the roads to help the emergency vehicles (Ambulance, fire-engine, police) reach the emergency locations comfortably and transiently, thereby saving the loss of life and property caused by the delay in arrival of these emergency vehicles. An idea which was thought with the view of using a technical solution to help the society, "Technology for Philanthropy" as they call it. And there I was, basking in the glory of my pre-mature conception, waiting to be nurtured and brought up.

Early Developments :

Two, very small number for a team, four makes it crowded, three is just perfect. Atleast this is what my team thinks. And enters Apoorv Agarwal. The third and final pillar of this team. The three of them brainstormed, improvised on the original idea and prepared an abstract to be sent to Intel IEC. Quark-2010 (The annual techfest of BITS-Pilani Goa Campus) was round the corner and they didn't miss the bang of that single knock. Quark gave them a deadline 2 months before Intel IEC to develop a working prototype and this was exactly what they needed. A basic working model which they could better upon in case they made it to the next round of Intel IEC.
Helping hand from a friend (Shubhankar Mitra), 2 large cardboard sheets, 2 chart papers, a lot of paint, huge number of LEDs, 1 Arduino microcontroller board fused together with some coding and their prototype had just gotten ready 15 minutes before their Quark event (Open Showcase). The results? Continue reading.

Much to their delight, they got, which was possibly the best news they had received in their engineering lives so far, the news of their selection in the 2nd round of Intel IEC. And it was that moment, when they realized that what they thought was a stupid idea, wasn't that stupid after all. It had potential. And the three of them embarked on a journey to extract and build upon that potential.

Achievements :

Competitions

• Quark - 2010 : 2nd prize in the Electronics category of Open Showcase.
• Intel IEC - 2010 : Reached the finals. (Top 30 teams from a total of 2170 participant teams)
• Microsoft Imagine Cup - 2011 : Made it to the second round in Embedded Development Category (Competition still going on).

Publications (National)

• ICARUS - 2010 : Paper on "Intelligent System for Quick Response to City Wide Emergency Calls" got selected for the first Indian Conference for Academic Research by Undergraduate Students held at IIT-Kanpur.

Publications (International)

• ICMLC - 2011:  Abhsishek Jain, Apoorv Agarwal, Tarin Bansal "Intelligent System for Quick Response to City Wide Emergency Calls", Proceedings of 3rd International Conference on Machine Learning and Computing, ICMLC 2011, Singapore. Paper accepted for publication in IEEE Xplore.

What's with the fancy name?!

Google will tell you that Columba, Pyxis and Auriga are constellations. Wikipedia will tell you their respective meanings. And I will tell you why I am named ColumbaPyxis Auriga.

Columba - Noah's Dove (Collects information)
Pyxis - Mariner's Compass (Shows the right path)
Auriga - Charioteer (Drives you to the destination)

And hence, the name.

But what exactly am I? What do I do? How do I work? How are they planning to implement me?
Where are they planning to implement me? Who are they (The team)? How is the progress going on? What are they doing right now? and a lot more questions to be answered in my upcoming posts. Stay tuned.
Adios amigos!