A student team from the University of Wollongong in Dubai (UOWD), a private university with Australian heritage, will represent the UAE in the finals of a Microsoft’s skills contest for student programmers.

The Microsoft Imagine Cup 2010, a contest which aims to aid developmental goals and address world issues, will be held in Poland in July.

The team was one of the top four performers in the regional finals of Microsoft Gulf Imagine Cup held in Dubai recently.

UOWD’s winning entry was Ear-It, a pure tone audiometer mobile application that screens, diagnoses and makes recommendations for hearing loss.

The Ear-It project was developed by students of the faculty of computer science and engineering, UOWD, in collaboration with the audiology department of the American Hospital Dubai.

The UOWD team was the only one among the ten participating Gulf universities, including five from the UAE, to be chosen for the global finals. Among the other teams, there were three from Oman, two from Kuwait and one from Bahrain.

“We did this project in conjunction with the ENT department at the American Hospital Dubai,” said Dr Mohamed Salem, dean, faculty of computer science and engineering, UOWD.

“We will be coordinating with them further to set up an impressive booth at the international finals in Poland to demonstrate our application’s role in early screening and diagnosis of hearing loss,” he added.

Dr Catherine Todd, assistant professor, faculty of computer science and engineering, said: “The students are very pleased with their win, because not only do they get to represent our university in Poland in an international competition in software development, but they also walked home with a Microsoft phone each.”

“However, they still have some fine-tuning work to do on their application leading up to Poland,” she noted.

The Ear-It software application addresses the global concern of hearing impairment by providing a low-cost, easy-to-use mobile phone application to test a user’s degree of hearing at several frequency and pitch bands.

The application also helps prevent users from acquiring noise-induced hearing loss by generating pure white noise to cancel out harmful noise (over 90 decibels) in the user’s surrounding environment, a statement said. – TradeArabia News Service