Department of Systems Engineering & Engineering Management

Will represent Hong Kong to compete in the Microsoft Imagine Cup World Finals in Brazil in July 2004.

A team from the CUHK Faculty of Engineering has won the Hong Kong Regional Championship in the Microsoft Imagine Cup 2004 Competition. The team consists of: CHAN Wai Nang (Dept. of EE), TSE Hok Man (Dept. of IE) and WONG Po Yan (Dept. of SEEM) advised by Professor Helen MENG (SEEM). The team of students receives a cash prize of HKD120,000 awarded by Microsoft Hong Kong and will be representing Hong Kong to compete with other regional champion teams in the Microsoft Imagine Cup 2004 World Finals in Brazil in July 2004. See the video clip of the awards ceremony (view with QuickTime), photo of the students and photo of the trophy.

The team has creatively designed and implemented a mobile, multimodal and multilingual system called "Portable Shopping Companion, (PSC), which is a distributed software system that runs on a mobile PDA client. The system supports bilingual (English and Chinese) speech recognition and text-to-speech synthesis, automatic bi-directional English-Chinese machine translation, speaker verification (i.e. voiceprint security) and location-awareness using Wi-Fi hotspots. The system enables the user (shopper) to browse through product webpages, locate stores in an arcade with the product in stock and help the user navigate a big arcade for particular stores. The system can also serve as an interpreter between an English-speaking tourist and a Chinese speaking salesman using real-time speech-to-speech translation technologies.

This project is supported by the United College Budding Scholars Exchange Program (with exchange partner being University of Washington, Seattle) as well as the Human-Computer Communications Laboratory, CUHK Department of Systems Engineering and Engineering Management.