The NTHUCS Team composed of Mr. Shuo-Hung Chen, Ms. Hsiao-Mei Lin, Yi-Cheng Chen and Mr. Che-Yi Hung, all students at the Department of Computer Science won the Taiwan Regional Championship earlier this year and represented our country in a global competition for the Microsoft Imagine Cup held in the U. S. last July. They excelled as the champion in the "Embedded Development Group" competition which included 484 participants from 70 countries around the world.

NTHUCS won the championship with the "Right! This Way" system they designed. It is an intelligent fire escape system using the networking capability of the embedded platform and introduces real-time fire scene detection. By monitoring the concentration of smoke, the among of floating particles, and other conditions of the fire scene, the system helps fire-fighters gain a better understanding of the situation and thus, enabling them to adopt a more effective extinguishing mechanism as well as accelerate the evacuation of individual trapped in the fire. The judges were very impressed with NTHUCS’s creativity and design and cited the "intelligent fire escape system" as original and practical.

The Microsoft Imagine Cup could very well be described as an Olympic tournament for student in scientific and technological fields. It was started in 2003 and has since become the world’s premier student technology competition. Annually, it attracted a large number of competitors from many regions of the world. The 2011 competition was held in New York with the theme of "to dream of a world where technology can solve practical problems."

Both Tsing Hua University in Beijing and NTHU were among the finalists in this year's competition. When NTHUCS won the championship, the team representing Tsing Hua, Beijing has also won the second place. This result pleases all the participants of two Tsing Hua teams. Ms. Hsiao-Mei Lin of NTHU was very happy that the two sister universities have done so well in a world-wide competition. Mr. Lin Yang of Tsing Hua, Beijing said that "the result of this competition is an excellent birthday gift from the students of the two Tsing Hua Universities to present it to their University and help with the centennial celebrations that are taking place both in Beijing and Hsinchu."