CUHK Engineering Students Win Regional Championship in Microsoft Imagine Cup 2004 Competition

CUHK Engineering Students Win Regional Championship in Microsoft Imagine Cup 2004 Competition. | Department of Systems Engineering and Engineering Management (SEEM), CUHK

2004-06-03

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 (Department of EE), TSE Hok Man (Department of IE) and WONG Po Yan (Department 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.

CUHK Engineering Students Win Regional Championship in Microsoft Imagine Cup 2004 Competition
CUHK Engineering Students Win Regional Championship in Microsoft Imagine Cup 2004 Competition

“The Virtual Performer” joint project participated by WONG Ka Ho (SEEM, M.Phil. Year 1) and WANG Jianqing (CSE, MPhil Year 2) awarded Level 2 Prize at the Challenge Cup Competition.

2003-12-09

The Engineering project entitled “The Virtual Performer” is one of six project selected across all disciplines to represent CUHK in the Challenge Cup Competition. The multimodal human-computer interface project has been awarded Level 2 Prize in the Challenge Cup Competition — a biennial event with participating projects from OVER 200 universities all across China. “The Virtual Performer” is a joint entry between SEEM and CSE departments — real-time computer speech technologies are developed by WONG Ka Ho (SEEM MPhil Year 1) supervised by Professor Helen Meng and runs in synchrony with real-time computer graphics technologies developed by WONG Jianqing (CSE MPhil Year 2) supervised by Professor Pheng Ann Heng and Professor T.T. Wong.

"The Virtual Performer" joint project participated by WONG Ka Ho (SEEM, M.Phil. Year 1) and WANG Jianqing (CSE, MPhil Year 2) awarded Level 2 Prize at the Challenge Cup Competition.
“The Virtual Performer” joint project participated by WONG Ka Ho (SEEM, M.Phil. Year 1) and WANG Jianqing (CSE, MPhil Year 2) awarded Level 2 Prize at the Challenge Cup Competition.
"The Virtual Performer" joint project participated by WONG Ka Ho (SEEM, M.Phil. Year 1) and WANG Jianqing (CSE, MPhil Year 2) awarded Level 2 Prize at the Challenge Cup Competition.
“The Virtual Performer” joint project participated by WONG Ka Ho (SEEM, M.Phil. Year 1) and WANG Jianqing (CSE, MPhil Year 2) awarded Level 2 Prize at the Challenge Cup Competition.
"The Virtual Performer" joint project participated by WONG Ka Ho (SEEM, M.Phil. Year 1) and WANG Jianqing (CSE, MPhil Year 2) awarded Level 2 Prize at the Challenge Cup Competition.
“The Virtual Performer” joint project participated by WONG Ka Ho (SEEM, M.Phil. Year 1) and WANG Jianqing (CSE, MPhil Year 2) awarded Level 2 Prize at the Challenge Cup Competition.

Professors Yao, Zhang and Zhou win SIAM Outstanding Paper Prize.

2003-04-22

A paper co-authored by three professors at our department, David Yao, Shuzhong Zhang and Xun Yu Zhou, “Stochastic Linear-Quadratic Control via Semidefinite Programming,” SIAM Journal on Control and Optimization, vol 40 (2001), 801-823, has been selected as a winner for this year’s SIAM Outstanding Paper Prize (to be awarded at the SIAM Annual Meeting in Montreal, June 16-20, 2003).

The SIAM Outstanding Paper Prizes were introduced in 1999, and are awarded annually. Three winners were selected each year among all the papers published in the 13 SIAM journals in the four years prior to the year of the award.

Professor Helen Meng has been awarded a grant of HKD4million from the Research Grants Council Central Allocation.

2003 January

Professor Helen Meng has been awarded a grant of HKD4 million from the Research Grants Council Central Allocation.

The project is entitled, “Towards Multi-Modal Human-Computer Dialog Interactions with Minimally Intrustive Biometic Security Functions” and aims to develop multi-modal authentication technologies to secure human-computer mixed-initiative multi-modal dialog interactions. Co-investigators of the project include professors across departments within CUHK as well as from HKUST and Polytechnic University — Professors P.C. Ching (Department of EE, CUHK), T. Lee (Department of EE, CUHK), Y.S.Moon (Department of CSE, CUHK), X. Tang (Department of IE, CUHK), M.W. Mak (Department of EIE, PolyU), B. Mak (Department of CS, HKUST) and M.H. Siu (Department of EEE, HKUST).