A team of UALR graduate business students 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., Microsoft announced today. UALR’s finish was a stunning accomplishment, considering it was the first year the University competed in the worldwide contest.

“It would have been a great experience even if we didn’t get in the top three. It was great to see how technology could be used to solve so many kinds of problems,” said Shreyasi Dutta, a member of Special Child that placed nationally. “It was good to network with so many different people in the industry. I would like to see more teams from UALR participate in the future. It will be good for the college and the students.”

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 Commonweath set the previous record of five teams.

The Imagine Cup is Microsoft’s largest competition, and they invest millions in it each year.

This year, Microsoft is calling on young programmers, artists and technologists across the country to rise to the challenge: “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.

The site includes an application that gives adoptive parents the means to supply the state with details concerning the kind of child or children they wish to adopt.  State caseworkers then would be able to store specific details about children in the state’s custody as they become available for adoption. Special Child would also analyze the integrity of matches between parents and children systematically identified by the Special Child application.

The goal is to promote children’s health and well-being by facilitating the adoption process and increasing the number of children placed into adoptive families each year in the state of Arkansas. The Special Child Team’s goal is to eventually use their database to facilitate adoption worldwide.

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.

Families of children would be able to enter possible exposure risks of which only they may be aware. Information contained in the database would include demographic data, type of pediatric cancer affecting each child, and the related environmental influences.

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.