A team of UALR graduate students will be the only team representing the United States competing for the H.E Suzanne Mubarak Special Award at the worldwide Microsoft Imagine Cup Software Design Initiative Finals in Cairo, Egypt, next month, a stunning accomplishment for the University in its first year of competing.

UALR’s team, “Special Child”, team members – Master of Science in management information systems majors – developed a software application that establishes a central point of information on adoptable children in state, private, and international agencies around the globe and families – also located globally – who have registered to be adoptive parents.

Team members are Joshua Thacker of Little Rock, Sandy Callahan of Conway, formerly of Benton; Shreyasi Dutta, a native of India now living in Little Rock; and Tomica Seals of Marvell.

The team has been coached by Dr. Janet Bailey, associate professor of management information systems, and Dr. James Parrish, assistant professor of management information systems, in UALR’s College of Business.

This year is the first time in the seven-year history of the competition that a team from a Mid-South university has made the nationals, much less the world finals.

The Imagine Cup initiative includes 10 categories from software design to short film. In addition, the first lady of Egypt, where the world competition is being hosted, asked Microsoft to create a special category for software programs designed specifically to help children. UALR’s team was selected to be one of the five competitors – the only U.S. team selected for the special award.

“I told them in January we have some of the best students in the country at UALR, and it was time the world knew it,” Bailey said. “Although they didn’t believe me at the time, I think we just proved it.”

The Imagine Cup is Microsoft’s largest competition and the software company invests 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 won second runner-up in the national Imagine Cup competition at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Mass., and was one of two UALR teams that made it to the nationals.

Earlier this spring, UALR fielded eight teams in the semi-finals competition, breaking the previous record of teams in the semi-finals. Three years ago, Virginia Commonwealth set the previous record of five teams.

The second UALR team in the finals at MIT was PRODIGY – Positioning Research on Dynamic Information Globally Yielded. The team of undergraduate MIS majors proposes using bioinformatics to uncover and eradicate causes of childhood cancer. Their application harnesses the power of technology to provide a mechanism through which parents, doctors, and medical researchers can enter data into a worldwide database. PRODIGY has the support of St Jude Children’s Research Hospital, the American Cancer Society, and the Neuroblastoma Foundation.

Those team members were 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.