MIS Team Qualifies to Compete in Microsoft World Finals
A team of UALR graduate business students is one of five teams selected to compete in the worldwide Microsoft Imagine Cup H.E. Suzanne Mubarak Special Award competition in Cairo, Egypt, next month.
The Special Child team was among 113 entries in the competition to get the chance to represent the U.S. at the worldwide finals. Special Team won second runner-up in the national Microsoft Corp. Imagine Cup Software Design Initiative competition at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Mass.,in April. UALR’s finish was a stunning accomplishment, considering it was the first year the University competed in the worldwide contest.
UALR won two spots in the national competition. Earlier this spring, UALR fielded eight teams in the regional competition and is the only university in the four-state region - Arkansas, Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana - to have a team in the nationals.
In fielding eight teams this year, UALR broke the previous record of teams in the semi-finals. Three years ago, Virginia Commonwealth set the previous record of five teams.
The Imagine Cup is Microsoft’s largest competition, and they invest millions in it each year. Students had to design software around the theme “Imagine a world where technology helps solve the toughest problems facing us today.” Now in its seventh year, the Microsoft U.S. Imagine Cup attracts more than 200,000 students from more than 100 countries globally to enter the competition.
Special Child, UALR’s team of graduate students, proposes to establish a central point of information on adoptable children through Arkansas state agencies and families who have registered to be adoptive parents.
Special Child team members - all Master of Science in management information systems majors - are Joshua Thacker of Little Rock, Sandy Callahan of Benton and currently residing in Conway, Shreyasi Dutta, a native of India who lived in Dallas before coming to Little Rock, and Tomica Seals of Marvell.
The teams have been coached by Janet Bailey, Ph.D., associate professor of MIS, and James Parrish, assistant professor of management.
The second UALR team in the finals at MIT was PRODIGY - Positioning Research on Dynamic Information Globally Yielded. The team of undergraduates proposes using bioinformatics to uncover and eradicate causes of childhood cancer. It harnesses the power of technology to provide a mechanism through which parents, doctors and medical researchers can enter data into a worldwide database.
Management Information Systems majors on the team are Angela Howell of Mabelvale, Bernard Myers of North Little Rock, Aaron Yates of Bryant, and Emil White of Sherwood, who is also double majoring in accounting.