Press releases

MINSK, 5 February (BelTA) – Microsoft invites senior school students, university students, those with a master's degree, and first-year postgraduate students to take part in the national stage of Imagine Cup, the international technological competition of young talents, BelTA has learned.

The deadline for online applications is 15 March 2018.

The 2018 Imagine Cup national stage will be held in Minsk in early April with the assistance of Microsoft. During the competition, young developer teams will present their projects before the experts. The best team will get an opportunity to go to the USA to compete for the grand prix — $100,000 for the consequent development of the winning project.

For many students, participation in the prestigious Imagine Cup contest marks the beginning of a successful career. The teams get recommendations from the leading IT experts after they present their first projects.

“Imagine Cup is a unique opportunity for Belarusian school and university students to unlock their potential in IT, showcase their projects, share ideas with foreign experts, start a career, or open a business. This is also a chance to get a decent startup capital,” head of the Microsoft representative office in Belarus Anton Myakishev noted.

As part of the 2018 Imagine Cup national qualifiers, the jury will evaluate the uniqueness of the projects, innovative technological solutions, the capability of the teams to present and defend their projects in Russian and English. The participants must submit an online application with the description of the project, its prototype, and short-term development prospects before 15 March 2018.

The 2018 Imagine Cup includes three categories: Mixed Reality (applications for AR and VR), AI (bots built with Microsoft Bot Framework), and Big Data (predictive models on the basis of big data using Microsoft Azure Machine Learning or CNTK, and also blockchain-based projects).

In 2017, the Imagine Cup final in Seattle saw a Belarusian team called Scrawless. The students came up with an idea to make a website to help kids with fine motor skill problems study: write texts, draw, and count.