Computer science students won award in China

See (far left) and Lai (far right) accompanied by Dr Tan

UTAR Faculty of Information and Communication Technology (FICT) Computer Science students Lai Suk Ling and See Tian Xin won the One-Belt-One-Road Exchange Award (“一带一路”交流奖) in the 10th Service Outsourcing Innovation and Entrepreneurship Competition (SOIEC) for Chinese College Students (第十届中国大学生服务外包创新创业大赛). The competition took place at Wuxi, China from 22 to 24 May 2019.

Their winning project titled “Cyber Physical Books Management System – The Librarian”, aimed to provide a solution to solve book managing issues in libraries, with the help of automated guided vehicle (AGV) and technologies such as indoor positioning and optical character recognition (OCR). Besides, the cost of the innovation is cheaper if compared to the existing technologies.

When asked about their intention for participating in this international competition, they said, “We wished to gain more experience and learn more about the culture and technology development trend in China as it is one of the progressive countries in the world.”

They added, “This was also a fruitful and eye-opening journey for us because we learned a lot from the competition. We were really impressed by the latest technology in China. We found out that our technology is still far behind. As the pillar of the country, we should work hard to help create a better development for our country in the future.”

Being proud to represent UTAR and also Malaysia, they expressed their appreciation to the University for providing them with a strong foundation to learn and have a deeper understanding of the latest technologies and skills. They said, “Having a strong foundation in the relevant fields helped us a lot in completing the prototype for the project.”

They walked away with a trophy and a certificate of participation. The team was mentored by FICT Department of Computer Science Dr Tan Joi San.

One-Belt-One-Road Exchange Award recipients during the award presentation ceremony

Sharing the honour with UTAR were another four universities, namely National Institute of Technology Durgapur from India, Pushchino State Institute of Natural Sciences from Russia, University of Dschang from Republic of Cameroon and Ritsumeikan University from Japan.

The competition aimed to provide a platform for students to showcase their creativity, to arouse students’ interest in the service industry utilising modern technology and to encourage higher learning institutions to foster more talented people for the service outsourcing industry. It attracted more than 4,000 teams from more than 500 higher learning education institutions in and outside China to participate.

The competition attracted a number of famous enterprises in China such as Alibaba, Huawei, Inspur, Pactera Technology International to participate in the proposition related to service outsourcing demand of the enterprises, with the topics closely related to the trends of the service outsourcing industry, including the application of new technologies such as cloud computing, artificial intelligence (AI), big data, Internet of Things (IoT), mobile internet and many more.

The competition was jointly organised by Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China, Ministry of Commerce of the People’s Republic of China and People’s Government of Wuxi Municipality, China. This was the tenth year of the competition and it has attracted nearly 400,000 students from 1,600 higher learning institutions in and outside China over the last decade.

Banner of the “Cyber Physical Books Management System – The Librarian”