BCNETwork News

May 2008

University of British Columbia Grads and Undergrads Take Top Broadband Innovation Challenge Prizes

The annual BCNET Broadband Innovation Challenge seeks applications from undergraduate and graduate students in British Columbia who have developed computer applications that utilize super-broadband networks, like the advanced network that BCNET operates provincially.

In addition to a combined $10,000 in prize money, the winning competitors in the challenge walk away with an extra boost of confidence to pursue their career and education goals.

"The biggest thing I learned about students when I worked in private industry," says Donald Acton, an Instructor of Computer Science at UBC, "is that students know more than they think they do. They just need the confidence to realize this." Donald Acton is the chair of the adjudication committee for the Broadband Innovation Challenge, a competition that gives students an opportunity to prove their smarts to the technology industry in BC - and to themselves.

Donald Acton, Chair of the Broadband Innovation Challenge Committee

2008 Broadband Innovation Winners

This year's Challenge brought out the best in BC's student projects and the students were judged in two separate categories: graduate students and undergraduate students due to an increase in submissions from both grad and undergrads.

The top prize winner in the graduate category is Brendan Cully, a PhD student at UBC, for his application "SecondSite", who takes home a $3,000 cash prize. SecondSite uses a virtualization platform for seamless, efficient disaster recovery. "For me, the best thing about the BCNET Broadband Innovation Challenge is the way it balances academic and industrial objectives. It's a unique opportunity to present research directly to those who can use it in real-world applications.", says Brendan Cully.

Second place prize of $2,000 in the graduate category is awarded to Samer Al-Kiswany, a Masters student at UBC, for his application "The Scavenged File System." The Scavenged File System is an alternative storage system that is more economical and reliable than systems currently implemented in business environments.

The first place undergraduate award goes to Charles Bihis, Victor Chan, Jason Hui and Andrew Tjia from UBC for their photo-sharing application, "Picture2Picture." Picture2 Picture improves on photo-sharing applications like Flickr by cutting out the need for a central server and with it, a single-point of failure. Their prize money of $2,000 also included two conference tickets and accommodation for to the Apple Developers Conference held June 9 to 13 in San Francisco. Group members were excited to receive the second prize generously donated by Apple.

Two undergraduate projects tied for second place; each awarded with $1,000 for "Distributed Content Delivery and Processing System" from Daniel Dent, Chris Binckly, and Ian South-Dickinson (UBC) and "Ramet" from Taivo Evard, Yanick Berube, and Tane Adam (UBC).

Honourable mentions are awarded to Yasser Hajivalizadeh an undergrad from UVic for his project, "Xbox Overlay" and Travis Brown another undergrad from SFU for "InsaneFS." Each student took home a $500 prize.

Harnessing the Power of Broadband Networks

One of the key characteristics of the Broadband Innovation Challenge is to demonstrate how the proposed project will make effective use of advanced networks in an innovative way that demonstrates commercialization potential and facilitates collaboration.

In its fifth year, the Broadband Innovation Challenge (formerly the Coolest Applications Contest), has become an exciting part of the BCNET Advanced Networks Conference. It provides a venue for undergraduate and graduate students to showcase their talents and presentation skills, learn the value of advanced networks and the commercialization potential of application design. In addition, the exposure at the conference provides them with an opportunity to network with members from industry that they would otherwise not get from their program of study.

The adjudication committee for the competition, made up of academic members, government and industry corporate partners, judged each project on merits of presentation, commercialization potential, high bandwidth requirements, innovation, technical difficulty and collaboration.

The combined $10,000 in prize money was made possible through the generous support of Sun Microsystems, TELUS, Shaw Business Solutions, Apple, SGI, Juniper Networks, Wimba, and Cisco Systems.

BCNET would like to congratulate all of the participants and thank the sponsors for making this competition possible. We look forward to seeing the many creative ideas demonstrating the utilization of British Columbia’s super broadband research network next year at the 2009 BCNET Broadband Innovation Challenge!