There is a competition held annually, open to academia, particularly post-secondary institutions within British Columbia. Hosted by BCNet, the competition is called the Broadband Innovation Challenge and the spirit of the competition is to find the best and most innovative student-built application which utilizes BC's super broadband research networks. Myself, and three other classmates (Victor Chan, Andrew Tjia, and Jason Hui), had an idea for such an application and were encouraged by our Distributed Systems professor to enter.

Our idea, essentially, was to utilize broadband connections more efficiently by distributing the load of sharing media (such as pictures or videos) amongst different machines. Pursuing this, we eventually created a peer-to-peer network utilizing the concept of distributed-hash-tables. In doing so, such a network becomes resilient to node failures, applies replication to backup media, as well as uses the network topology to make efficient use of the existing connections.

Four months later, and many, many long nights in front of the monitors, we presented our final application, we dubbed Picture2Picture, to a panel of judges prior to the BCNet conference in April. Low-and-behold, we managed to take home first prize in the undergraduate category! We each received plaques, a cash prize, and even more surprising, an invitation from Apple themselves to join them at the Apple Wordwide Developers Conference in San Francisco this June! This is a great honor and we're very excited to be able to attend this conference. Thanks BCNet and thanks Apple!

^*Update: Our project has just been mentioned on the UBC Computer Science website as well as the BCNet website :)