This is the VOA Special English Technology Report, from http://voaspecialenglish.com | http://facebook.com/voalearningenglish
Last week we
told you about the Imagine Cup finals in the United States. Team FlashFood from
Arizona State University won top honors at the Microsoft event. The team
developed a mobile application and website to help restaurants, hotels and
farmers markets donate food to people who need it. The businesses enter
information about the food they would like to donate. A notification goes to a
team of volunteer drivers who can go pick up the leftover food and take it to
people in need. This is perishable food, the kind of food that cannot normally
be handled by food banks or other food recovery organizations. The FlashFood
project grew out of the Engineering Projects in Community Service program at
Arizona State. The director of that program, Richard Filley, says the project
has far-reaching possibilities. Mr. Filley plans to work with the team to find
ways to extend the FlashFood app to other countries. In his words, "Would those
cultures in those different countries be open to the idea of taking leftover
food and using FlashFood to connect with people who are hungry? We don't know
the answer to that yet," says Mr. Filley. The Imagine Cup is now in its tenth
year. Mark Hindsbo is a vice president with Microsoft. He says students who
enter the competition can now build their ideas around a lot of technology that
was not widely available ten years ago. "In the beginning," he says, "people
were building almost everything from scratch." But now, he points to the
FlashFood app as a good example of bringing together existing technologies. The
students built the app on the assumption that there are smartphones in the hands
of most of the people they need to work with. Also, the use of mapping software
lets the app give the volunteer drivers turn-by-turn directions to the
restaurants with food to donate. Team FlashFood will represent the United States
at the Imagine Cup world finals in Australia in July. Mark Hindsbo says solving
world problems like hunger is a major goal of the competition. But another major
goal is to get more American students interested in jobs in science and
engineering. "When you look at the pipeline in science, technology engineering
and math, we come up way short," he says. As a result, he says around a million
software and tech jobs could go unfilled in the United States over the next five
years. For VOA Special English, I'm Carolyn Presutti. (Adapted from a radio
program broadcast 07May2012)
원문출처 : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOkACS5jOJ4&feature=youtube_gdata
English
한국어
