Purdue News

October 27, 2000 Students set their sights on winning $5,000 Internet Olympiad WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – Purdue students will race against time in a high-tech showdown to create new, commercially viable Internet technology in the first Internet Olympiad beginning Saturday (11/4). The first round of the Olympiad, a "quiz show" with some audience participation, will be 2:30 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. in Fowler Hall, Stewart Center. This event is free and open to the public. "The goal of the Internet Olympiad is to get students to develop a prototype of an Internet application for which they could get venture capital funding and start a company," said Aditya Mathur, associate head of the Department of Computer Sciences. Six teams from the first round of competition, based on their knowledge of the Internet and technology, will be selected to advance to round two. Each advancing team will be awarded $400 and additional prizes. In round two, which begins Nov. 11, the six teams will be given 96 hours to solve a technical problem about the Internet. Three of the six teams will win $600 and advance to the third and final round of the competition. The last round of the Internet Olympiad will begin in February 2001. The final three teams will have three months to create an Internet-based application. Twenty experts from the computer industry will select the winning team based on criteria including the teams' creativity and the application's scope for commercialization. Full-time undergraduate students on Purdue's Lafayette campus are eligible to enter the Internet Olympiad. To enter, students must form a team of three to four students and send an e-mail with the name and e-mail address of each team member to olympiad@cs.purdue.edu. Next year, Mathur would like to expand the competition to an inter-collegiate competition. Corporate sponsors of the event are Tivoli, IBM Corp., Schulmberger, Eli Lilly and Co. and Microsoft. CONTACT: Aditya Mathur, associate head, Department of Computer Sciences, (765) 494-7823, olympiad@cs.purdue.edu To the Purdue News and Photos Page