The International Software and Productivity Engineering Institute (INTSPEI) partnered with Microsoft Corporation Ukraine in sponsorship of the prestigious "Imagine Cup 2007" software engineering competition for Ukraine's brightest and most promising university technology and mathematics students.

The Microsoft "Imagine Cup" started four years ago, and has already had more than 100,000 students from over 100 countries and regions participate in competitions. This year, more students than ever will be looking for victory in the nine competitions set up under three main categories, each reflecting this year's theme; Technology Solutions, Skills Challenges, and Digital Arts.

The theme of this year's Imagine Cup, for which the worldwide finals will be held later this year in Seoul, South Korea, is "Imagine a world where technology enables a better education for all." The challenge is to use technology to improve education around the world.

INTSPEI's sponsorship of this event was to help highlight the fact there are approximately 500 institutions of higher learning in Ukraine and more than 2.2 million students, among them a very large number of well-educated and talented software engineering and mathematics students. INTSPEI has already hired three of the top Ukrainian applied mathematicians from previous "Imagine Cup" competitions, one of whom finished second in the worldwide competitions and the other two finished first in the Ukrainian competitions. In this sponsorship with Microsoft Corporation, INTSPEI's intention is to give back to Ukraine for what Ukraine has given to it.

The winners of the Ukrainian "Imagine Cup 2007":

Oleksii Kuchaiev, Kirill Yacenko, Valeriy Prohorov,
Petro Protsyk

Shown is the winning team from Kiev National University that successfully developed a project that enables visually disabled people to effectively participate in classes and learning situations with all other students.