Announcing our Imagine Cup 2018 10 UK Finalist teams!
It’s that time of the year again when we see the UK’s top student developers coming together to create innovative solutions, looking to change the world. With the Imagine Cup UK National Finals fast approaching, we are excited to announce our 10 finalist teams, competing for their spot at the Worldwide finals this July.
Congratulations to the 10 UK Finalist teams…
1. Black Light - Firepoint: University of Abertay 
Firefighting Training Simulator using both the HoloLens and Mixed Reality headset to educate and teach the public and trainee fighters on how to deal with different scenarios.
2. Higher Education App: Imperial College London 
This project is an application and website that allows users to make and share their own highly interactive educational content.
3. Interview Bot: The University of Manchester 
A web application developed to prepare students for job and internship interviews. The application gives real-time feedback on the user’s response to interview-style questions, including sentiment analysis and a written transcript of the interview.
4. My Uni Bot: University College London & University of York
Assists universities in communicating with international applicants in an easier, cheaper and more effective way by answering their questions, reminding of deadlines and missing documents.
5. Pantry Logs: University College London, University of Cambridge and Imperial College
A solution to food waste. It scans and recognizes all the food items and logs this information into our mobile app. Our app notifies users when their food is close to expiring and sends recipe recommendations based on the types of food users already have.
6. War Space: Abertay University 
A Real-Time Strategy game that builds a game level out of the Player's environment and adapts to any changes the Player creates to it.
7. Bad Flamingo: The University of Cambridge
Pictionary, with an AI twist
8. Soothey - An RNN-Powered Mental Healthcare Bot: University of Oxford
Mental illness is more common than diabetes, heart disease or even cancer. We combat this by early prevention with an RNN powered mental healthcare bot, so people with light symptoms can fine-tune their thought patterns using CBT-based techniques.
9. Visual Cognition: University College London, University of Cambridge and Imperial College
We improve the internet accessibility for those with visual impairments by using machine learning, powered by Microsoft’s Cognitive Services, to generate the missing image descriptions.
10. Wellbeing Bot - Common Room: University of Oxford
Our project seeks to bring the myriad counselling services universities and colleges offer to a more accessible, online platform.
The UK Final will be on Friday 6th April at Microsoft HQ, London, UK
Each of these teams will pitch their solution to a panel of expert judges, consisting of
Rob Fraser (Commercial Software Engineering, Microsoft UK and Ireland Lead)
Haiyan Zhang (Innovation Director at Microsoft Research)
Michael Wignall (Microsoft UK CTO)
Louise O’Connor (Executive Producer at Rare Ltd).
They will have the have the difficult task of choosing who will go through to the worldwide finals this July, which will take place at Microsoft HQ, Redmond, Seattle, US.
The UK Winners Prize Pot
1st prize (£5000 and an Xbox One X per person)
2nd prize (£3000)
3rd prize (£2000).
Good luck to all our finalists and we look forward to announcing our UK winners!
If you are interested in entering the Imagine Cup 2019 next year, sign up here.