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| Sophomore excels in Microsoft robotics competition |
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| Profiles |
| Written by Nol Sahatciu |
| Sunday, 27 September 2009 20:08 |
 Ergys Ristani on campus. Photo by Venelina Miteva. Ergys Ristani is a sophomore from Albania, majoring in Computer Science. He has recently been awarded the 12-th place in a Microsoft competition named the "Imagine Cup". He is mainly interested in robotics algorithm. Read about Ristani's views of the competition, the COS department at AUBG, and also the pros and cons of robotics.
Where did you first get the idea for the Competition? I first got the idea from a French TV station, but I didn't have the ability to participate in that competition. There was no Microsoft Albania, you know. Where was the competition held? The first round is an online round, and then the regional round is held in Sofia, and finally the world-wide round which is in Egypt. I didn't have to go through the Sofia round, so I submitted my entry online, and if I would have been among the first six, I would've gone to Cairo. I was 12th. Did you receive any kind of prize and what exactly did you do there? I am expecting to receive a certificate for my ranking, and also a letter of recommendation from Microsoft Bulgaria. I had to program the behavior and the logic of the robots. The hardware was already set up, only the logic needed to be programmed. The most important part was the visual aspect. The robot had cameras and I had to interpret the images and to make the robot find its way and avoid obstacles through those images. Could you have done any better than this? Yes, I think I could've but I was working on it two weeks before the finals, ... and I also had to get ready for the States. So I had one week of time to work on it, since in the States I couldn't have worked on it, so I did an early submission. Sixty thousand people participated in this competition, right? Well, the competition has categories, like software design, robotics algorithm, etc. So 60,000 was the number of participants for all categories, but I don't know the exact number of people in my category, but only 250 people completed the first round. When we got the ranking list only the qualified names were mentioned there. How did you first learn to program? Alone. Do you plan to compete again? Yes, this year I'm competing again but not in robotics and algorithms, since the category does not exist this year. ... This year, I am competing in software design, and I already have a team [of four people], and we have an idea about the project. [The competition] has already started, but we will compete in the regional round with teams from Bulgaria in May. If we win the local round, we go to Poland. What can you say about the organization of this competition? The competition was good. And the theme for the competition was solving the world's toughest problems through Microsoft technologies. What they consider as problems are: primary education, poverty, etc. And we have to imagine the solutions to these problems. Do you think robotics is important as a science? Yeah, nowadays many of the processes are getting automated and it's the use of robotics which has made technology evolve so far. So I want to give my contribution to it. Unfortunately it also has its shortcomings because more people get unemployed since they get substituted by robots. So it's both bad and good at the same time. Do you know of any important breakthroughs in robotics which have occurred recently? Actually there was a programmed robot; it had joints of a human being, like the bones, and they had programmed it to act like a human being. If you would add the skin on top, you could hardly recognize if the gestures and movements, like a handshake, were of a real human being or a robot. Are you satisfied with the Computer Science department at AUBG? I haven't actually taken that many courses to give a mature judgment about that, but so far it's ok. The only thing that concerns me is that they really need another professor. Especially for next semester because there are two majors now. Did the courses you took here help you in the competition? Yeah, there is this partnership with Microsoft, and I learned that I could participate in "Imagine Cup" when Microsoft came here to make their presentation. Are there a lot of students here who share your ideas and interests? It's kind of hard, maybe because most of the students consider computer science merely as a major, and they don't want to do something beyond the courses and what is offered here. So you have to do more. |
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Cheers.