"Presenting BitNapkin at the conference was a great opportunity to introduce our application to potential beta testers, and network with 500 IT experts in industry and academia" -Vera Lukman, first place winner of BCNET Digital Media Challenge 2012.

Vera Lukman is the winner of the BCNET Digital Media Challenge, a student competition that took place at the BCNET & HPCS Conference on May 1, 2012. Lukman and three student contenders competed for audience votes during a 90-minute plenary session, where they had 15-minutes to present their projects. The audience chose Lukman as the winner of the competition for a $1000 award.

Lukman's project, BitNapkin, is an innovative mobile drawing application that enables users to collaborate anywhere, both visually and verbally, in really real time.

Watch the demo.

"Presenting BitNapkin at the conference was a great opportunity to introduce our application to potential beta testers, and network with 500 IT experts in industry and academia," says Lukman. "The Challenge was a fantastic learning experience about how to present in an easy to understand, simple and concise manner. I enjoyed demonstrating a prototype of BitNapkin, to show how it enables users to collaborate in really, real time through integrated drawing and voice communication."

The Digital Media Challenge is designed to recognize and award students for technology innovation and is open to higher education students from BCNET member institutions. They participate for cash awards and high profile speaking opportunities at the BCNET annual information technology conference for higher education and research. The competition seeks innovative and creative technology applications that are distributed or shared over a network and the project must be part of the students' coursework.

Watch Vera Lukman's Presentation at the BCNET & HPCS Conference

Awards were also presented to three semi-finalists who competed at the Digital Media Challenge during the conference.

Second Place

In second place, conference attendees voted in favour of PhD student, Mahdi Tayarani Najaran, from University of British Columbia's Computer Science Department. He received $500 for TracerMaps, Distributed Framework for Adaptive Quality in Interactive Games. Watch the demo

Third Place

The third place prize of $500 was awarded to Winnie Chung, the team leader for INAMOMENT, an interactive and collaborative performance combining dynamic movements with motion tracking and social media. Chung is the project team lead for INAMOMENT representing students from the School of Interactive Arts and Technology at Simon Fraser University. Watch the demo.

Fourth Place

In fourth place, Kieran Coulter took home $500 for SoundSphere an application that is designed to provide an immersive sound and gaming experience. Coulter is an undergraduate student from Computer Science at the University of British Columbia.
Donald Acton, chair of the Digital Media Challenge and a senior instructor of Computer Science at University of British Columbia introduced the competitors at the conference. Watch the demo.

"The competition helps students to think about the relevance of digital media technology to a wider community and also experience presenting their project in a meaningful way to a diverse audience."

Donald and eight other digital media experts from higher education selected the semi-finalists at a private all-day adjudication day.

Voting for the competition was open to conference delegates who are IT professionals and researchers from higher education institutions across Canada, as well as high tech industry professionals. Over 200 people watched the presentations as well as the live streamed webcast. The audience was asked to vote through text, online or paper ballots.