The Aricent Group, a global innovation and technology services company, has announced the result of its annual innovation competition, the 'Bright Minds' Technical Paper Contest. The Bright Minds contest was an initiative rolled out by the company in 2010 to foster a culture of innovative thinking among engineering students in India, and to offer them a platform to present their original and innovative ideas. As part of the contest, every year, the company invites technical papers from engineering students across the country on topics such as Computer Science, Telecommunications, Electronics&Engineering, and Information Technology. The company receives thousands of ideas and the papers are evaluated by a panel of domain experts in the relevant fields. 

The first three winners were given a certificate and an Apple iMac, an iPad, and an iPod Touch, respectively, in an event held at Hotel Park Plaza in Bangalore on 15 June 2012.

Speaking about the contest, Aricent Group's Assistant Vice President of HR, Satish Chandra said, "The idea behind the Bright Minds contest is to foster a culture of innovative thinking among Indian engineering students. In today's business environment, engineering colleges and students in India need to focus more on research and innovation to meet the growing demands for innovation across industries. The Bright Minds contest was developed keeping this in mind."

"Every year we receive thousands of innovative technical papers from engineering students across the country. We have a rigorous process for selecting the winners and only the most innovative minds win." Mr.Chandra concludes.

The winners of the contest are:

- Udhay Shankar. P from P S G College of Technology, Coimbatore won first prize for his paper titled "Sensor Actuator Camcorder Router Enabled Device for Human Enshrinement Avocation and Recalcitrant Tracking".

- Swathika S from Thiagarajar College of Engineering, Madurai won second prize for her paper titled "Enhancing E-Payment Security through Biometric- Based Personal Authentication Using Steganography Scheme".

- Akshit Mahajan, from Chitakara Institute of Engineering and Technology, Himachal Pradesh won third prize for his paper titled "Software based Automatic Vehicle Identification aided by OCR for License plate Recognition using ANN and Multilayer Perception."