“Team Curious” featuring former Dalton resident prevails in Microsoft competition

Published 5:52 pm Thursday, July 23, 2009

Two Georgia Tech students were determined to enter The Imagine Cup, Microsoft’s global technology competition, but lacked an idea.

So former Dalton resident Marc-Antoine Paré and his partner, Kathy Pham, set aside a day for brainstorming last fall with the goal of 100 ideas. The possibilities were “all over the place,” Paré said. Some were good, some were bad. Paré and Pham left that session without a solid idea.

“I was walking to class one day and the idea hit me,” said Paré, 21, a 2006 graduate of the McCallie School in Chattanooga. “The whole design came to me. It’s just a spark, then you flesh out all of the details later. It’s funny. It wasn’t even one of the ideas we came up with.”

That idea — using a combination of news feeds, computers programs and the social networking site Twitter to determine how people feel about the issues of the day — beat out teams from around the world and earned the duo a first place finish in The Imagine Cup’s “MashUp” category. A MashUp combines data from two or more sources into a single application.

“Team Curious” — the name of Paré and Pham’s squad — was the lone U.S. entry to win first place in one of the nine invitational categories open only to students. Paré and Pham were treated to a five-day trip to Cairo, Egypt, for The Imagine Cup finals earlier this month. Their first-place finish also netted them an $8,000 cash prize and an audience of some of the top technology experts on the globe.

The trip to Cairo was exciting for Paré. He had already traveled extensively — he’ll spend the fall interning at a nuclear power company in France — and is originally from Quebec. His family moved to Dalton 10 years ago.

In Egypt, Paré stayed at a westernized hotel and was shielded by contest officials from the seedier parts of Cairo. He was able to see many of the landmarks. The famed Egyptian pyramids served as the backdrop for the awards ceremony.

More than 300,000 students registered for the contest, while 59,000 from 142 countries competed. They participated in local, regional and online competitions to earn a spot in The Imagine Cup Finals.

The theme of the contest was “Imagine a world where technology helps solve the toughest problems facing us today.” The object of the MashUp competition was to create a “new and useful” Web 2.0 application connected to the contest theme. Students used Microsoft PopFly along with third party data and services to make “a new and unique tool” for Internet users.

The winning application “Team Curious” developed compiles news feeds from a number of sources — such as Fox News, daily newspapers and Internet news sites — on current topics including AIDS, global warming and poverty. The program then assigns sentiments to the topics based on the tone of the articles and reaction to the topics on Twitter. A more detailed description of the application can be viewed at teamcurious.com/actors.

“The goal all along was to make an impact,” said Paré, a mechanical engineering major. “What was so cool about it was Microsoft runs this contest just for that. The whole way along, the contest wasn’t about making money or pleasing a business executive, it’s all about doing something good for the world.”