Microsoft Imagine Cup Finals

Indian Student Dinesh Agarwal emerges as one among top ten



Dinesh Agarwal, an Indian student from Surat, Gujarat is one among the top ten to reach Microsoft's Imagine Cup 2012 – a prestigious student competition. The fact that his project has been adjudged as one of the top 10 projects among 113,000 registered contenders – brings out the magnitude of his resounding success.

Dinesh has created a system named Crayons that can be used to speedily and accurately determine the safe rescue shelters during natural disasters such as hurricane, earth quake, or tsunami.

Currently, the software available for this processing is far too time-consuming and hence less than effective during emergency situations. Bearing this in mind, Dinesh has created his system capable of simultaneously pressing into service several thousand computers to tremendously accelerate the process.

Dinesh says that he was inspired to do this project because hurricane Katrina caused loss of 1836 lives in addition to an estimated $81 billion of property damage due to inability to access timely pertinent information. If sufficient number crunching had been done more speedily, this loss could have been largely averted. The fact remains that in United State alone hurricanes comprise 23% of all cyclones and cause 81% of all damage.

Dinesh’s solution will help the governments, policy-decision makers, and emergency response teams to make informed decisions in almost real time. His present innovation has drastically reduced the time interval from six and a half hours to an incredibly low 10 minutes.

Dinesh Agarwal is a PhD student in Department of Computer Science at Georgia State University. He works under the guidance of his advisor Dr. Sushil Prasad. Their software system Crayons has received recognition from experts and this is borne out by the fact, they have been awarded grant of $200,000 from National Science Foundation (NSF) as also Microsoft.

It is noteworthy that Dinesh Agarwal is also competing for Microsoft's People Choice awards for his project Crayons. Please click here and vote for him to help him reach the first place. By voting once every day you also stand a chance to win a prize. We wish Dinesh Agarwal greater and grander successes in times ahead.

