Academic innovation rewarded by awards

Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team Jul 2, 2003

Microsoft has demonstrated its commitment to fostering academic innovation by awarding grants to colleges and universities around the world.

Microsoft has demonstrated its commitment to fostering academic innovation by awarding grants to colleges and universities around the world.

The company announced that 77 colleges and universities from more than 25 countries have been awarded Innovation Excellence Awards for Windows Embedded with grants totalling $1.7 million to fund new research projects and curriculum development based on Microsoft Windows Embedded platforms.

The grants were awarded by Microsoft University Relations in conjunction with the Microsoft Windows Embedded Academic Programme (WEMAP), a free programme that provides academic educators and researchers with access to source code, development tools and support for the development of projects.

This Innovation Excellence Awards for Windows Embedded announcement is another step in Microsoft's strong alliance with academia in turning ideas and research into reality.

Microsoft will host a Windows Embedded Academic Developers Conference to help jump-start learning opportunities and build a worldwide community for grant recipients and other members of the academic community.

"We received a tremendous quantity of remarkable proposals from the academic community for research projects and curriculum development based on the Windows Embedded platforms.

Winners were selected for their outstanding examples of creativity and innovation", said Douglas Leland, Director of University Relations at Microsoft Research.

"From robotics to wireless and ubiquitous computing, there is a great deal of activity in the device space.

As more and more powerful computing devices develop, making fundamental contributions to the future of technology, our mission at Microsoft is to help promote that innovation and make software easily accessible to empower the next generation of engineers".

To participate in the Innovation Excellence Awards for Windows Embedded, more than 120 colleges and universities worldwide submitted more than 130 research and curriculum proposals that included use of either Windows CE.NET or Windows XP Embedded.

Grant recipients were selected based on a variety of criteria, including scientific merit, novelty, innovation and public accessibility to the results of the work.

The Windows Embedded Academic Programme is available to colleges, universities and academic institutions worldwide.

It enables new curricula such as courseware and research projects by providing academics with the Windows Embedded Academic Curriculum Licence (WEACL), which permits access to more than 2 million lines of source code through the Windows CE Shared Source Licence.

In addition, WEACL provides development tools and support that enable users to collaborate on projects easily via the Windows CE.NET Shared Platforms Programme as well as access to Microsoft Official Curriculum materials for both Windows XP Embedded and Windows CE.NET.

WEACL enables engineers to create projects and modify code for development, testing and evaluation purposes only.