Next week, 48 student teams from across the globe will present their purpose-driven applications in regional Imagine Cup World Final events where they will vie for USD50,000 in prizing and continue to showcase their ideas and technology – this time to a panel of expert judges through a pitch, demo, and question/answer session. Judges will assess the projects’ innovative use of Azure technology, accessibility, inclusion, and marketability as a business idea and then select the top team in each of the competition’s four categories—Earth, Education, Health, and Lifestyle—in each region. The top scoring team in each region will then advance to the 2022 World Championship in May.
This year’s panel of judges includes industry experts with backgrounds in accessibility, digital transformation, sustainability, the championship of diversity, and more. Their combined expertise will allow them to determine which teams have designed original and ingenious solutions with the potential for global impact.
Meet our World Finals judges!
AMERICAS
Vice President, Education Experiences Microsoft |
Deirdre joined Experiences and Devices in 2021 as VP of Education Experiences leading the teams responsible for tools, apps, and services to improve outcomes for learners worldwide. She serves as a Director on the board of Block by Block, a non-profit partnership between Mojang Studios and UN-Habitat that uses Minecraft to empower youth and women in developing nations. She holds an undergraduate degree in Economics from McGill University in Montreal and an MBA from Seattle University, and she completed the Stanford University Executive Program. |
Salma Alam-Naylor Netlify |
Salma — or whitep4nth3r –currently works at Netlify as a Staff Developer Experience Engineer, streams live coding, and loves helping people get into tech. Salma is active in the developer community. She is a Microsoft MVP for Developer Technologies and a relentless advocate for building a truly accessible web. Founder of unbreak.tech, womenwhostream.tech, and womenofjamstack.com, her projects call for social change and equality in the technology industry, and her expertise is in Jamstack and related front end web technologies. |
Senior Cloud Advocate Microsoft |
Alfredo is a software engineer, speaker, author, and former Olympic athlete working as a Senior Cloud Advocate for Microsoft. He has almost two decades of DevOps and software engineering experience and has taught Machine Learning Engineering and DevOps courses. His areas of expertise include Azure and cloud computing, DevOps, MLOps, Python, Databricks, and automation with CI/CD, and he has written several books about DevOps and Python including “Python for DevOps and Practical MLOps”. He is currently leading engagements with several prominent universities where he often gives guest lectures about Azure, Python, and technology in general. |
SVP, Growth & Transformation Happify Health |
Hillary is SVP of Growth & Transformation at Happify Health, the Intelligent Healing Company™, which configures personalized digital therapeutics and care solutions for the modern healthcare cloud. Her focus is on building the company's capabilities to enable the digital transformation of healthcare and pharma clients in order to deliver better clinical outcomes to their customers. Prior to Happify Health, Hillary led finance and operations for Piano.io, a digital experience platform in the cloud. She holds an MBA from Columbia University and began her career investing in high tech companies within the US and emerging markets at Oaktree Capital. |
Co-Founder and Innovation Director Earth Hacks Foundation |
Bhargav is the co-founder and Innovation Director at Earth Hacks, a nonprofit organization dedicated to using hackathons as a tool for environmental action. Outside of Earth Hacks, Bhargav is a Product Manager at Capital One and previously worked as a healthcare technology consultant for Cerner. Bhargav received his bachelor’s degree in Biomedical Engineering from Virginia Commonwealth University. |
ASIA
Chief Growth Officer AppliCAD |
Jeerawat is the Chief Growth Officer at AppliCAD Public Limited Company (APP). Prior to AppliCAD and SIRIVENTURES, he spent 16 years at Microsoft in various business development and evangelist roles. His proud moments included leading the largest Windows Server launch campaign in Thailand and coaching Thai student teams to win the Microsoft Imagine Cup World Championship 4 times. |
Space Tech and AI Lead EY |
Dr Olivia Sackett is the Space Tech and AI Lead for EY Oceania, for which she leads the strategy, design, and delivery of Earth Observation products and services. She manages collaborations with global tech organizations and world-class academic institutes such as NASA, Microsoft, Swinburne University of Technology and CSIRO. Olivia has a PhD in polar marine science, spectroscopy and hyperspectral analysis and modelling, which led her into the field of remote sensing. Olivia led STEM teams to design and deliver EY’s 2021 and 2022 Better Working World Data Challenges, attracting many thousands of participants globally to tackle bushfires and biodiversity loss. |
Director of Education Microsoft Australia |
Tiffany is currently Director of Microsoft’s Education Industry business for Australia. Over the last 22+ years, Tiffany has held various roles across sales, business management, and executive leadership spanning Australia & New Zealand, Asia, US & Europe working with customers across many industries on how they leverage technology to achieve business goals. Tiffany is known for developing and championing young and diverse talent and is passionate about fostering leadership roles for women in IT. Tiffany holds Masters in Communications Law and MBA Management degrees from UTS, Sydney; and a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Sydney. |
Engineering Manager Tata 1mg |
Niloshima has over 13 years of fully hands-on experience in Software Development and Delivery spanning across multiple domains such as GIS, RTK, Healthcare, BFSI, Smart Cards and Logistics with multiple tech stacks involving front ends along with Serverless Microservices Backends, Cloud, SOA and RESTful APIs. She has experience leading teams in multiple lifecycles of design and implementation of applications development and has worked in multicultural environments with teams across US, Europe, and India |
Cloud Advocate Microsoft |
Renee is the Regional Cloud Advocate for the broader Australia region as well as the Microsoft Reactor in Sydney. She's passionate about technology, education, community, and bringing them all together in-person and online. Renee is a staunch advocate of women in tech, spending her spare time leading the Girls' Programming Network to support women and girls in tech and growing support for under-represented communities in IT as the CEO of Tech Inclusion. She also teaches computer science in a high school and runs her own business, ConnectEd Code, working to bring exciting coding opportunities to kids and teachers. She’s been named among the Australian Financial Review’s 100 Women of Influence in 2019, featured as one of Women’s Weekly’s “Women of the Future”, and showcased by CREATE Magazine in their “10 Emerging Women of Engineering”. |
Europe, Middle East, and Africa
Cloud Advocate Microsoft |
Carlotta is a Cloud Advocate at Microsoft focused on Data Analytics and Data Science. As a member of the Developer Relationships Academic team, she works on skilling and engaging educational communities to create and grow with Azure Cloud by contributing to technical learning content and supporting students and educators in their learning journey with Microsoft technologies. Before joining the Cloud Advocacy team, she was an Azure and AI consultant on the Microsoft Industry Solutions team mainly involved in customer-facing engagements focused on Conversational AI solutions. Carlotta earned her master’s degree in Computer Engineering from Politecnico di Torino and her Diplôme d'ingénieur from Télécom ParisTech by completing a E+/EU Double Degree Program |
Matthew Smith Scientific Technologies Ltd |
Matthew has spent a career innovating new tools to empower organizations to make better decisions using predictions about the future of our biosphere. He has managed international conservation projects and advised on policy for international authorities. He held roles as a research scientist, solution architect, and director of business development at Microsoft turning science-based insights into business actions. He was a Chief Product Officer for an agri-data marketplace company and is now Chief Environmental Officer developing a new “Planetary Intelligence” business. Matthew is driven by empowering others with the best possible science-informed information that they need. |
Government and Education Lead Microsoft, Middle East and Africa |
Ihab is an international executive with more than 25 years’ experience. He brings expertise in business transformation and organizational capability building to his role as General Manager for the government and education sectors for Microsoft Middle East and Asia regions. He has led multiple hyper-growth projects in endeavor ventures, including launching industry solutions, cloud services, scaling up partner ecosystems, and transforming organizations. |
Octopus Ventures |
Kirsten helped scale Seedcamp from 30 investments to almost 200 before becoming the Managing Director of Europe’s first Cyber Security accelerator. Last year Kirsten joined Octopus Venture and is launching a micro pre-seed fund called First Cheque Fund to invest in pan-European pre-seed stage start-ups. |
Chief Technology Officer Aridhia Informatics |
Rodrigo is an R&D software engineer with a mathematical background and expertise in developing analytical and data management applications in healthcare, life science, and knowledge management start-ups. Rodrigo has been instrumental in Aridhia’s innovation, leading the development of the Aridhia Digital Research Environment (DRE) and fostering new approaches to research data management and analysis. Today he is responsible for driving the product strategy for the DRE and leads on Aridhia’s approach to precision medicine and the application of machine learning in the clinic. |
Follow the competition journey on Instagram and Twitter to find out which 12 teams the judges will select to win in the competition’s four categories—Earth, Education, Health, and Lifestyle—in each region. The top three teams in each region will get to move forward to the World Championship in May. Stay tuned as they get ready to compete for the chance to take home USD100,000 and a mentoring session with Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella!