IMSC’S Roger Zimmermann is reaping a bumper harvest of student achievement in national competition.

Rice-bound: (left to right): Daniel Owen, Jackson Hsieh, Roger Zimmermann, Leslie Liu, Kamalesh Jha.

Two Zimmerman teams have cleared their qualifying initial rounds. One is headed for the Rice University Business Plan Competition finals in Houston, the other for the Microsoft Imagine Cup 2006 Software Design Challenge finals in Redmond, WA.

Both teams include CS PhD candidate Leslie Liu. Zimmermann, a research assistant professor who is research area director in IMSC’s Media Immersion Environment, says “Liu has been pursuing research in peer-to-peer media streaming. He has recently teamed up with four MBA students from the Marshall Business School to prepare a business plan based on the technology.”

The Rice competition is the largest of its kind in the world, a three-day contest that simulates the real-world process of young entrepreneurs soliciting start-up funds from early-stage investors and venture capital firms.

More than 120 schools submitted business plans worldwide and the IMSC/Marshall group was one of 36 were selected that make it to the finals.  There, they will compete against Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Yale and University of Pennsylvania and other powerhouse business schools, with more than $200,000 prize money at stake.

Liu also is part of a three-student IMSC team that received word April 10 that it has qualified for the final round in the Microsoft competition, which “challenges students around the globe to explore their own creativity by using technology to solve what they consider to be challenging problems. Imagine Cup provides a theme but the competitors provide the genius behind innovative, dynamic, and powerful software applications,” according to TheSpoke, a Microsoft online news source aimed at technology students.

Redmond, WA-bound: (from left) Liu, Beomjoo, Min, Zimmermann

Liu teamed with two other PhD students, Min Qin and Beomjoo Seo on another multimedia streaming project. The next step, according to Zimmerman, will be to write a detailed Design Specification under the guidance of a Microsoft mentor.

Then they will join 14 other teams who will journey to US Finals, held at Microsoft's Headquarters in Redmond, Washington, May 4-6, 2006. This elite group will exhibit and demonstrate their initial solutions to an audience of press, academics, and Microsoft employees. The winning team from this round will go on to represent the US at the Worldwide Finals in Delhi, India.