pune a team from the college of engineering pune coep bested 30000 others from across the globe to win microsofts imagine cup egypt 09 a prestigious student technology competition the coep team comprising shaizeen aga swati gour and akshay galande from the computer science department won the top spot and a us 5000 cash prize in the parallel computing category addressing a press conference here on wednesday shaizeen said the competition was a challenge for us as it is judged on the technological skills of the participants in solving some of the toughest problems the trio completed their engineering studies from coep this may the competition was held in 11 categories and saw the participation of over 3 lakh students the team conducted a project in phylogenetic tree construction which shows the evolutionary relationships among various biological species by efficiently implementing it in parallel computing they used the maximum likelihood algorithm which is most apt for the task but rarely used by scientists as it is time consuming to make the algorithm work faster we used parallel implementation a form of computing in which many calculations are carried out simultaneously exactly like asking colleagues to chip in at work when you want to finish the given task at a faster rate akshay explained the coep team used the algorithm for protein amino acid sequences we intend to further look into making the implementation more efficient we started working in april and submitted the project to microsoft for the competition on may 20 so we had little time and we could not scale it up however we now wish to work in detail on a larger scale and if it works we will take it into the market swati informed this was coeps maiden appearance in the imagine cup since its inception seven years ago the results were declared in the first week of june on their website this was also coeps maiden appearance in the imagine cup since its inception seven years ago