I competed several years in a competition called Microsoft Imagine Cup. It is a contest for computer scientists.
There are some categories, but I decided to compete in the "Software Design" category. Here it is possible to find more information about Imagine Cup.

For the Microsoft Imagine cup contest in 2006, my teammates and I developed a software called “Third Eye”. It was a computer vision program. The aim was to observe hospital patients with acute diseases 24 hours a day. The software had to recognize if the patient needed assistance and to warn doctors with mobile technology. We reached 2nd place at national finals.
The next year, in 2007, we developed a software called “Con.NET”. The aim was to help people to learn easier. We made a software with various functionalities. In particular our software could transform a Wiki (like Wikipedia) in a 3D library, so a user could find information easily, because a 3D library is very similar to real life environment.

Third Eye

ThirdEye is an application that aims to improve the actual sanitary-hospitals techniques and to be a new tool for medical research, with the aim to reveal new horizons and to discover that may improve the life of ill people.
Those that for several reasons are not self-sufficient (for example children and patients) need continuous attentions, which can be difficultly supplied 24h on 24h. The reasons are obvious: in the case of a hospital, an uninterrupted surveillance from part of the staff is too expensive and for this reason it cannot be supplied; the same principle can be applied at the parents that have to take care of infants.
In order to solve this problem, we thought to automate the surveillance using a computer infrastructure:
the system consists of a video camera that watches the patient, and a video processing unit.
The effectiveness of the system is that it’s not limited to a mere video storage, but it also analyses the video flow with particular algorithms, and it virtually reconstructs the three-dimensional scene. In this way the system has the possibility “to understand” what it is happening and, if adequately trained, it can react in the best way.
The video flow is supplied from a stereo camera (it has two different lens), which allows to reconstruct the scene in a virtual three-dimensional one after an appropriate computation. The virtual scene is then elaborated with tracking algorithms to recognize the patient’s movements.
After that, the system analyzes the reconstructed patient’s movements, taking advantage of the acquaintances derived from the medical field and the information stored in the local database, and acts consequently.
If the event demands a timely participation, the system alerts the competent doctor’s Pocket PC, giving the opportunity to view the scene on his mobile device with a simply video sequence or a 3d virtual representation.
The same system can be applied to domestic environments, for example to observe a child. In any case, the system records in a database the information about the patient’s behavior; this type of data can be integrated with other biometric information, to supply a valuable aid for the research.

Here it is possible to find the project document (in English).

Other applications

Here it is possible to find the documents of my other projects, Con.NET and Explorer360 (in Italian).