HIGHLIGHTS

WWU Student in Finals of Imagine Cup Competition in August in Seoul, South Korea

Western Washington University senior Brian Thomas had a busy summer 2007, which included meeting Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates and a trip to Seoul, South Korea in August to take part in the finals of Microsoft’s Imagine Cup.

The Imagine Cup is a worldwide student technology competition in categories such as software design and web development. Thousands of entrants completed online projects, and the top 500 online qualifiers in the North America region were sent to regional semifinals in San Jose, New Orleans, Boston, and Toronto. Thomas, as well as two other WWU students, Cameron Hatfield and Alex Luke, finished in the top six in the San Jose regional, and moved on to the North American finals in Redmond in June.  From there, Thomas and his team went on to win first place – and a ticket to Seoul, courtesy of Gates, who attended the event and personally congratulated the winners.

Thomas, a computer-science major from Tacoma, and his team had a month to prepare for Seoul. His team was working on a product called Omni, which uses the current craze of social networking websites such as Facebook to encourage communication across language barriers.

“One of the greatest obstacles for language students is moving from the classroom to native speaking, and Omni seeks to overcome these difficulties using social networking,” Thomas said. “It’s designed to help language learners of varying skill share information.”  If completed and publicly released, the Omni project has the potential to help students all over the world learn languages.

David Bover, chair of the Computer Science Department at Western, said the successes of students like Thomas, Hatfield, and Luke were important because they provide further verification that WWU’s graduates are competitive nationally, and across the world.

“This encourages us to believe that our curriculum is providing good preparation for the diversity of opportunities and challenges in the computing profession,” Bover said.