Israeli Engineering Students Take Second Place in Istanbul Competition

Three Israeli students from Ben Gurion University of the Negev won second place at the International Cultural and Academic Meeting of

Engineering Students conference (ICAMES), a world-wide engineering project competition organized by the Engineering Society of Bogazici

University in Istanbul.

Gilad Keizler, Yuval Ben Zion and Nimrod Shalit’s final project in the Department of Industrial Engineering and Management at Ben-Gurion

University was the only project from Israel to be accepted to the prestigious Istanbul competition, which has been held in Turkey for

the last 20 years.

“This is a very competitive contest,” Dr. Adir Even, who supervised the students’ project, told Tazpit News Agency. “Dozens of student

teams from around the world from different engineering disciplines compete and usually one or two projects are accepted from each country.”

Sri Lanka came in first place in the competition.

The three Israeli students spent the past year developing a special app called StaTeam system, which provides comprehensive information

and computer technology (ICT) solutions for basketball teams. The system is based on a mobile application for efficient data collection

and storage during games and provides a variety of Business Intelligence (BI) utilities for analyzing and visualizing the data

collected over time. The system provides the coach with decision support tools toward improving the performance of individual players,

as well as the entire team for reasonable prices.

“It’s the first time that a service of this type would be available to smaller scale basketball teams, community leagues, etc. at a more

reasonable cost than the kind of technology that  big league professional teams use,” said Dr. Even.

For the Ben Gurion students, the Istanbul experience was a positive one. “We got to know engineering students from Lebanon and Egypt, from

all over the world,” said Yuval Ben Zion to Tazpit. “What interests all of us is engineering not politics,” Ben Zion added.

“It was a great honor to reach second place. We’ve been working on this project day and night and it was great to see the results of our

work and receive positive feedback.”