Year 2005   Dec 2005 Microsoft Research Asia Fellowship Award clinched by a SCE student Nov 2005 ACM CIKM 2005 ‘Student Travel Award’ goes to SCE student Erwin Leonardi and supervisor A/P Sourav S Bhowmick Oct 2005 SCE student sees GOLD again for IES Publication Award Aug 2005 Top Ranked Paper at DEXA 2005 July 2005 Learning a new language has its rewards July 2005 SCE undergraduate wins Microsoft Imagine Cup 2005 - Algorithm Invitational June 2005 Silver award at DSTA Best Projects Competition June 2005 Best Paper Award at IEEE International Workshop on Projector-Camera Systems 2005 May 2005 Best Paper Award at the 3rd IEEE International Conference on Intelligence and Security Informatics May 2005 SCE teams clinched top placings in National Microsoft Imagine Cup 2005 May 2005 SCE students were 2nd runners-up at the Startup@Singapore National Business Plan Competition Apr 2005 Regional 1st and World 29th in ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) Apr 2005 Best Paper Award at the Symposium on Small Satellites for Earth Observation Apr 2005 SCE Student represented Singapore at the Asia-Pacific Students’ Entrepreneurship Society Summit 2005 Mar 2005 NTU undergrad wins Google coding battle Feb 2005 SCE student placed joint-4th in the SIMagine Programming Contest 2005 Year 2004   Dec 2004 SCE Lecturer is the First in Singapore to Win the British Chevening/Royal Holloway Scholarship for PhD Studies Nov 2004 SCE Produced One of the Top Papers at the International Conference on Conceptual Modeling (ER) 2004 Nov 2004 SCE Won Prizes in SG@home Ideas Competition Nov 2004 IES Publication Gold Award 2004 (Student Category) Nov 2004 PhD student and his supervisor won Best Paper Award at the 13th ACM Conference on Information & Knowledge Management Oct 2004 Best Paper Award at the 8th IEEE International Symposium on Distributed Simulation and Real Time Applications Oct 2004 NTU grabs both best paper awards at the inaugural IEEE Symposium on Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Sept 2004 SCE Won Top Prize in Data Storage Unlimited Design Competition Aug 2004 SCE students developed mobile applications for the industry Mar 2004 Ast/P Franklin Fu Cheng Peng and his final-year-project (FYP) students won the consolation prize of CoE exhibition Mar 2004 A/P Alexei Sourin and his students won the consolation prize of the CoE (College of Engineering) exhibition Feb 2004 SCE student, Deepak Prabhakara, won the Operators' Award at SIMagine 2004 Jan 2004 NTU SCE teams won top awards at the Inaugural Grid Innovations and Applications Competition Jan 2004 SCE Top Prize Winners in the 2002 Wireless Java Jam Competition Have Started their own Companies Jan 2004 SCE alumni, Amit Bhatia and Rajesh Krishnan, made History in the World Universities Debating Championships 2004 Year 2003   Dec 2003 PhD work of two SCE graduate students have earned recognition in the 14th International Conference on Genome Informatics, Yokohama, Japan Nov 2003 SCE Vice Dean (Research), A/P Lee Bu Sung Francis has been elected as the inaugural President of SingAREN by the Singapore network research community Nov 2003 SCE students win Motorola Buddy Finder Challenge Competition Nov 2003 SCE PhD student, Ye Minghua, is a Microsoft Research Asia Fellow for Year 2003 Oct 2003 Best Paper Award at 2003 European Simulation Symposium Oct 2003 NBS-SCE team win SIFE World Cup Competition in Germany Oct 2003 One of the first Singaporeans to be invited to the organising committee of the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries 2004: A/P Lim Ee Peng Aug 2003 NTU wins HP Grant for Wireless Project Aug 2003 SCE student won 2nd place in the first Java Masters Contest beating over 2000 contestants from all over the world Aug 2003 SCE Students in Winning Team of the National Students in Free Enterprise (SIFE) Competition Aug 2003 SCE Team won Top Prize in Business Plan Competition organised by Nanyang Technopreneurship Centre July 2003 AutoShop came in Joint-Third in the Microsoft Worldwide Imagine Cup 2003 in Barcelona, Spain June 2003 Best Paper Award for SCE Dons Mar 2003 SCE teams win major awards at the Wireless Challenge Competition Feb 2003 SIMagine 2003 Feb 2003 Autoshop won the Asia Microsoft.NET competition Feb 2003 Lua Eng Keong receives the Australia Asia Award Jan 2003 Autoshop - A Wireless Shopping Experience

 

Year 2005

Microsoft Research Asia Fellowship Award clinched by a SCE student (Dec 2005)

Wang Jinjun (left) with Assistant Managing Director of MSRA Dr Kurt Akeley

CE PhD student, Wang Jinjun, won the Microsoft Research Asia Fellowship Award for 2005. He impressed the evaluation panel with his clear and focused research topics and excellent academic records. The award presentation was held on 15 Dec 2005 in Singapore. Jinjun received US$6,000 and an attachment with the Microsoft Research Asia Lab in Beijing for a period of 3 to 6 months.

Started in 1999, the annual Microsoft Research Asia Fellowship Program is designed to support talented PhD students who have the potential to become future research leaders.

 

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ACM CIKM 2005 ‘Student Travel Award’ goes to SCE student Erwin Leonardi and supervisor A/P Sourav S Bhowmick (Nov 2005)

The paper, “Detected Changes on Unordered XML Documents Using Relational Databases: A Schema-Conscious Approach”, by PhD student Erwin Leonardi and supervisor A/P Sourav S Bhowmick won the Student Travel Award at the 14th ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM) held in Nov 2005 in Bremen, Germany. Erwin and A/P Bhowmick investigated the performance of a relational-based unordered XML change detection technique, HELIOS, which uses a schema-conscious approach (Shared-Inlining) as the underlying storage strategy. It was shown that for large datasets, HELIOS is up to 52 times faster than X-Diff, a published main-memory based unordered XML change detection algorithm.

The ACM CIKM is a premier international forum for presentation and discussion of research on information and knowledge management, as well as recent advances in data and knowledge bases. The Student Travel Award is presented to selected papers whose first author is a student. Congratulations to Erwin who received a certificate and a sum of 500 Euro from the CIKM committee.

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SCE student sees GOLD again for IES Publication Award (Oct 2005)

For the 2nd consecutive year, a SCE student has won the IES Publication Gold Award (Student Category). Supervised by A/P Jagath C Rajapakse, Joshua Lau won the award with a paper on his final year project titled ‘Independent Component Analysis with Reference on EEG and MEG data’.Joshua was presented with a certificate and a $300 cheque during the IES Dinner & Dance at Ritz Carlton on 28 October 2005

Joshua (left) receiving his award at IES D&D.

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Top Ranked Paper at DEXA 2005 (Aug 2005)

Masters student Vladimir Kovalev and supervisor Ast/P Sourav S Bhowmick authored the paper titled ‘Detecting Semantically Correct Changes to Relevant Unordered Hidden Web Data’ which was selected as a top ranked paper at the 16th International Conference on Database and Expert Systems Applications 2005 (DEXA) held in Copenhagen, Denmark in August 2005.

The paper is the first to address a significant problem in state-of-the-art change detection algorithms for tree-structured data (eg., XML data, web data). Both authors received the certificate of excellence from the DEXA committee.

DEXA is a premium international forum in Europe that addresses the entire spectrum of database and expert systems.

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Learning a new language has its rewards (July 2005)

SCE undergraduates Yanto Kakop and Ong Thong Tat (extreme right)

SCE students clinched the first and second runner-up places in the tertiary category of the Japanese Speech Contest organised by The Japanese Association of Singapore in July 2005. Yanto Jakop and Ong Thong Tat, was placed 2nd and 3rd respectively. Thong Tat has chosen to learn Japanese and took it as a general elective during his last semester.

For this competition, he had to prepare a speech script, go for speech training sessions with his sensei (Japanese word for teacher), do a speech recording and finally present his speech on the final’s day. The whole contest, from preparation to selection and finally reaching the finals to do the presentation, lasted for almost 3 months. It was indeed a good learning experience for budding learners like Thong Tat.

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SCE undergraduate wins Microsoft Imagine Cup 2005 - Algorithm Invitational (July 2005)

SCE undergraduate, Phuong Ngoc Nguyen, won the first prize for the Imagine Cup 2005: World Champions – Algorithm Invitational which was held in Japan in July. This online, individual and timed competition calls for contestants to demonstrate quick thinking and coding skills using Microsoft® programming languages such as Visual Basic® .NET, Visual J#® .NET, Visual C#® .NET or Visual C++® .NET. Phuong Ngoc takes home the prize money of US$8000 for the event.

SCE undergraduate, Phuong Ngoc Nguyen (middle)

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Silver award at DSTA Best Projects Competition (June 2005)

SCE third year student, Wong Chia Sern (left)

SCE third year student, Wong Chia Sern, was awarded the Silver Award in the DSTA Internship Best Projects Competition 2005 for two projects, “Advanced Planning and Decision System (APDS)” and “Multiple Path Finder (MPF)”. The competition, organised by DSTA, involved projects undertaken by IA students during their internship with the company.

The first project, APDS, uses the Bayesian networks approach to artificial intelligence (A.I.). With the APDS, a commander focuses on strategies while the system monitors the ongoing situation and alerts the commander accordingly. The system also provides recommended courses of actions to help the commander in his decisions.

The second project, MPF, uses the A* search algorithm to find three distinct, short paths from a starting point to a designated end point. The system also provides alternative paths in the event that the best path choice is impassable. A feature of this project is the ability to find efficient paths in a large road map swiftly.

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Best Paper Award at IEEE International Workshop on Projector-Camera Systems 2005 (June 2005)

SCE Associate Professor Cham Tat Jen and his PhD student Song Peng walked away with one of two best paper awards at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) International Workshop on Projector-Camera Systems (PROCAMS) 2005 San Diego, held in conjunction with Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR). PROCAMS 2005 resulted from a recent surge of awareness and interest in systems that combine projector technology with computer vision research, and is a gathering of top researchers in this field.

Song and Cham's paper on "A Theory for Photometric Self-calibration of Multiple Overlapping Projectors and Cameras" described their breakthrough method in mathematically modelling the complex nonlinear relationship between an image sent to a projector and the appearance of the projected display as observed in a digital camera. Such a mathematical model may, for example, be used when creating a large seamless display formed by cleverly exploiting multiple partially-overlapping projectors, or for producing a perfect display on non-uniform surfaces. Previously, these models were calibrated using expensive photometers or sensitive cameras with high dynamic range imaging capability. Song and Cham's research demonstrated how more economical off-the-shelf cameras may be used in a novel way for calibration, thereby making the process affordable with no loss in accuracy.

There was a strong favourable reception to Song Peng's presentation at the workshop, with senior researchers from various countries enquiring about implementing the authors' method for their own use. There is also a high likelihood that the results from this work will have a significant impact on the projector-camera systems industry.

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Best Paper Award at the 3rd IEEE International Conference on Intelligence and Security Informatics (May 2005)

A paper co-authored by Sun Zhen (MEng student in SCE), A/P Lim Ee Peng (SCE), Ast/P Chang Kuiyu, Ong Teng Kwee (IDSS), and A/P Rohan Gunaratna (IDSS) won the best paper award at the 3rd IEEE International Conference on Intelligence and Security Informatics (IEEE ISI-2005) held in Atlanta, Georgia, in May 2005.  The winning paper, “Event Driven Document Selection for Terrorism Information Extraction,” presents a few interesting methods to select a small subset of relevant documents from a large collection and extract from them terrorism event related knowledge.  The work is a result of collaboration between the Centre for Advanced Information Systems (CAIS), SCE and the International Centre for Political Violence and Terrorism Research (ICPVTR) of Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies (IDSS).  This terrorism informatics research group has been working together to develop new software technologies and tools for gathering and analysing terrorism data.

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SCE teams clinched top placings in National Microsoft Imagine Cup 2005 (May 2005)

From left: Stanley Tan (Microsoft Mentor), Angela Tan(SMU), Dorothy Tan(SMU), Vincent Ong, Justin Koh and Dr Yow Kin Choong (Faculty Mentor)

Two teams consisting of SCE undergraduates emerged champions and runners-up at the national finals of the Microsoft Imagine Cup 2005 held on 24 May.

The champion team, Envisage, comprises SCE students Koh Meng Tat, Justin and Ong Wee Shiang, Vincent, and two students from SMU. The team's winning entry is a shopping system, KAIMONO, which allows consumers to shop anywhere, anytime with their mobile communication devices. The system allows consumers to do price comparisons, share reviews, reserve seats at restaurants, and even locate their friends while shopping. The system also enables retailers to sell their wares beyond the constraints of a physical shop space and opening hours.

From left: Rony Joseph Palathinkal, Truong Minh Nguyen, Hoang Viet Dung and Naveen Peter

Another team, consisting of computer engineering students Naveen Peter, Rony Joseph Palathinkal, Hoang Duc Viet Dung and Truong Minh Nguyen, took the runner-up spot with their application, MediSign. Their system uses low-cost RFID tags to track medical consignments along the supply chain. It allows retailers to track medicine shipments and detect the sales of counterfeit drugs.

Envisage will represent Singapore in the Microsoft Worldwide Imagine Cup at Yokohama, Japan, in July 2005.

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SCE students were 2nd runners-up at the Startup@Singapore National Business Plan Competition
(May 2005)

From left: Rony Joseph Palathinkal and Naveen Peter

SCE team, RoNav, consisting of CE4 students Naveen Peter and Rony Joseph Palathinkal, came in third in the Startup@Singapore National Business Plan Competition held on 28 May 2005. They won for themselves a cash prize of S$10,000 to assist them in their start-up venture.

Their solution, MediSign, is a inventory management system which protects pharmaceutical manufacturing firms in India from losses arising from counterfeit drugs. It also tracks medical consignments along the supply chain. MediSign provides authenticity for inventory management systems using low-cost RFID tags. The system hopes to address the problem of sales of counterfeit drugs which poses allows serious health and safety issues.

The 6th Start-Up@Singapore competition attracted a record number of 330 entries. Teams from the research institutes of A*STAR with their patented technologies, existing startup companies, and winners of international business plan contests competed in the regional super bowl of business plan contests. The international participation included teams from Canada, China, Hong Kong, India, Malaysia, UK and USA.

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Regional 1st and World 29th in ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) (Apr 2005)

Mr Jones (extreme left) and his team in Shanghai

After winning the Asian leg of the Asia Regional Contest of the prestigious ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) held in Mumbai last December, a team comprising 3 third year SCE students Tran Thanh Hoai, Phuong Ngoc Nguyen and Duc Viet Dung Hoang, led by coach Mr Kevin Anthony Jones competed against 77 other teams (winners of regional competition) in the world finals held in Shanghai on 6 April 2005. The SCE team displayed exemplary programming skills and achieved the 29th position in the world.

 

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Best Paper Award at the Symposium on Small Satellites for Earth Observation (Apr 2005)

	A paper by Bharath Ramesh (former EEE project officer), Deepak Mohan (EEE project officer), Ast/P Timo Bretschneider (SCE) and former SCE Ast/P Ian McLoughlin was ranked second best paper at the Symposium on Small Satellites for Earth Observation, held in Berlin, Germany in April 2005. The title of the paper is “Centralised Computation Service Architecture for the X-Sat Micro-Satellite”.
SCE Lecturer, Ast/P Timo Bretschneider (middle)

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SCE Student represented Singapore at the Asia-Pacific Students’ Entrepreneurship Society Summit 2005 (Apr 2005)

SCE Student, Sonali Goila (extreme left)

3rd-year student, Sonali Goila, represented Singapore at the International Asia-Pacific Entrepreneurship Society (ASES) Summit at Stanford University, California, held in April 2005. Sonali Goila is currently the president of NTU ’s Students’ Initiative for Technopreneurship.

ASES is an international student entrepreneurship organization dedicated to networking student leaders worldwide and educating them on technology and business. The ASES Summit 2005 gathered 37 top students who are interested in starting their own businesses to meet and interact with like-minded students from around the world.

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NTU undergrad wins Google coding battle (Mar 2005)

SCE Student, Ardian Poernomo (extreme right)

A third-year computer engineering undergraduate, Ardian Poernomo, out-programmed 14,000 other participants from the region (India, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Singapore, Nepal, Myanmar and the Maldives) to take the top prize of S$11,700 in Google ’s India Code Jam programming contest. This is the third contest organised by Google, the world’s largest search engine, and the first time it is held in Asia. The judging criteria included speed of coding and accuracy of the algorithms.

 

 

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SCE student placed joint-4th in the SIMagine Programming Contest 2005 (Feb 2005)

SCE student, Mr Deepak Prabhakara, was placed joint-4th in the SIMagine Programming Contest 2005, an annual WorldWide JavaCard Programming contest organized by Axalto in collaboration with SUN Microsystems & Samsung Semiconductors.

His entry "SIMRemote" brings the convergence of the internet and mobile networks, giving mobile phone users the ability to remotely access their phones from a Web Interface. A user is able to remotely access his phone when the device is not physically with him. Apart from the ability to divert calls, messages or read phonebook entries, the user can also lock his phone so that no one else can access sensitive information on his phone. On top of this, the user can stay in touch with calls and messages by diverting them to another telecom device nearby.

Deepak was invited to the 3GSM Congress at Cannes from 14 to 17 Feb 2005 where he presented his ideas at the 4-day conference. In the finals, he won the "Telcel Operator Award" and a cash prize of 5000 euros, being placed joint-4th with 5 other teams.

 

Year 2004

SCE Lecturer is the First in Singapore to Win the British Chevening/Royal Holloway Scholarship for PhD Studies (Dec 2004)

From left: Associate Professor Lau Chiew Tong, Head of Division of Computer Communications; lecturer Adrian Leung Ho Yin; British High Commissioner, His Excellency, Mr. Alan Collins; Professor Er Meng Hwa, Deputy President 2 and Dean of School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering

SCE's lecturer, Mr. Adrian Leung Ho Yin, won the British Chevening/Royal Holloway Scholarship to pursue a PhD programme in the United Kingdom. He is the first in Singapore to receive this award. It is jointly funded by the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London and the Royal Holloway College, University of London. The British High Commissioner, His Excellency, Mr. Alan Collins presented the award scroll on 1 December 2004 to Mr. Leung in a ceremony at the Eden Hall, British High Commissioner's residence.

Mr. Leung will pursue a PhD in Information Security at the renowned Information Security Group of Royal Holloway College, University of London, under the supervision of distinguished Professor Chris Mitchell.

The selection criteria for the award are previous academic achievements and the candidate's potential for significantly influencing the future development of science, society and culture in the global environment of the twenty-first century.

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SCE Produced One of the Top Papers at the International Conference on Conceptual Modeling (ER) 2004 (Nov 2004)

Assistant Professor Sourav S Bhowmick

The paper titled “Efficient Recursive XML Query Processing Using Relational Database Systems” authored by Sandeep Prakash (Master’s student, SCE, NTU), Sourav S Bhowmick (supervisor of Sandeep and Ast/Prof, SCE, NTU) and Prof Sanjay Madria (University of Missouri-Rolla, USA) was selected as one of the top papers at the International Conference on Conceptual Modeling (ER) 2004. Only 6 papers out of 293 submitted papers were selected as top papers of ER 2004. The authors were invited by the ER committee to submit the extended version of the paper to the Data and Knowledge Engineering Journal (Special Issue on Top Papers of ER 2004) published by Elsevier Science. The extended version will appear in 2005/2006.

The paper proposes a novel approach for storage and querying of XML data in relational databases. This research area has generated significant interest since 1999. There are basically two approaches for such storage mechanism: schema-conscious and schema-oblivious. During 1999 to 2003, a growing body of works by the XML research community suggested that schema-conscious approaches perform better than schema-oblivious approaches. This paper proves that the above statement is not always true! The authors showed that it is indeed possible to design schema-oblivious storage approach that can outperform schema-conscious approaches for certain types of recursive XML queries. Recursive queries are quite important in the context of XML databases. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this research is the first attempt to design a schema-oblivious approach that can outperform schema-conscious approaches.

The International Conference on Conceptual Modeling (ER) is a premium international forum that addresses the entire spectrum of conceptual modeling. It addresses research and practice in areas such as theories of concepts and ontologies underlying conceptual modeling, methods and tools for developing and communicating conceptual models, and techniques for transforming conceptual models into effective information system implementations including advanced applications such as e-commerce, knowledge management, learning environments, telecommunications, and enterprise management systems.

This year the 23rd ER conference was held in Shanghai, China in November 2004. The committee received 293 submissions, from which the committee accepted 57 papers – or 19.5% of the submissions – as full research papers. The low acceptance rate puts ER in a small group of highly selective conferences, and this is reflected in the high quality of the research programme.

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SCE Won Prizes in SG@home Ideas Competition (Nov 2004)

From left: Student Guo Zaiyi and Ast/P Tay Joc Cing	PhD student Wang Zhen

Ast/P Tay Joc Cing won 2nd prize in the Open Category of the National Grid Office's SG@home Ideas Competition for his project on "Modeling HIV Pathogenesis Dynamics through Multi-Agent Simulation".

PhD student Wang Zhen won 3rd prize in the IHL (Institutes of Higher Learning) category of the National Grid Office's SG@home Ideas Competition for his project on "Traffic Control and Simulation".

The prize presentation ceremony was held at Singapore Science Centre on 17 Nov 2004. The competition was jointly organised by the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA), the Educational Technology Division of the Ministry of Education (MOE), the National Grid Office (NGO) and the Singapore Science Centre (SSC).

The SG@home project aims to harness the spare cycles of PCs in homes, schools and other organizations to work on a cause-worthy grand challenge that appeals to Singaporeans. The SG@home Ideas Competition is a channel to tap onto the collective talents of our students and the general public to identify suitable challenges for the SG@home project.

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IES Publication Gold Award 2004 (Student Category) (Nov 2004)

From Left: Student Djoko Wibowo and his supervisor Ast/P Tay Joc Cing

Mr. Djoko Wibowo, SCE student, won the IES Publication Gold Award 2004 (Student Category) for the division of Computer Engineering and Information Technology in Oct 2004. The title of the paper was "An Effective Chromosome Representation for Evolving Flexible Job shop Schedules". He was supervised by Ast/P Tay Joc Cing.

As the Flexible Job Shop Scheduling Problem (or FJSP) is strongly NP-hard, using an evolutionary approach to find near-optimal solutions requires effective chromosome representation and a design of related parameters to solve the FJSP effectively. The paper proposed a new chromosome representation and a design of related parameters to solve the FJSP efficiently. Empirical experiments show that the proposed chromosome representation obtains better results than the others in both quality and processing time required.

The award was presented to Mr. Djoko Wibowo at the IES Dinner and Dance on 5 November 2004.

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PhD student and his supervisor won Best Paper Award at the 13th ACM Conference on Information & Knowledge Management (Nov 2004)

From left to right: PhD student QianKun Zhao and his supervisor Ast/P Sourav S Bhowmick

The paper titled “Discovering Frequently Changing Structures from Historical Structural Deltas of Unordered XML” authored by Qiankun Zhao (Ph.D. student, NTU), Sourav S Bhowmick (supervisor of Qiankun and Ast/Prof, SCE, NTU), Mukesh Mohania (IBM India Research Lab, New Delhi), and Late Yahiko Kambayashi (Kyoto University, Japan)  won the "Best Interdisciplinary Paper" award at ACM CIKM 2004. This award is given to the best paper that bridges at least two of the general areas of interest to the conference, namely databases, information retrieval, and knowledge management. Each author received a certificate and a total sum of US$1000.  This is the first time that a paper from Singapore has received best paper award in CIKM.

The above paper also won the “Distinguished Hyperion Travel Grant” award in the conference. This award is given to 5 selected papers whose first author is a student. The purpose of the program is to encourage student participation at the conference by partially or fully funding the travel costs of students. Qiankun received a certificate and a sum of US$500 from the CIKM committee.

The paper proposed a novel approach to discover the frequently changing structures from the sequence of historical structural deltas of unordered XML. To make the structure discovering process efficient, an expressive and compact data model, H-DOM, is proposed. Using this model, two basic algorithms, which can discover all the frequently changing structures with only two scans of the XML sequence, are presented. Experimental results show that the algorithms, together with the optimization techniques, are efficient and scalable.

The ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM) is a premier international forum for presentation and discussion of research on information and knowledge management, as well as recent advances on data and knowledge bases. The purpose of the conference is to identify challenging problems facing the development of future knowledge and information systems, and to shape future directions of research by soliciting and reviewing high quality, applied and theoretical research findings.  This conference is sponsored by ACM SIGIR (Special Interest Group in Information Retrieval).

This year the 13^th ACM CIKM was held in Washington, D.C., USA from Nov 8^th to 13^th. The committee received 303 submissions, from which the committee accepted 60 papers – or 19.8% of the submissions – as full research papers. The low acceptance rate puts CIKM in a small group of highly selective conferences, and this is reflected in the high quality of the research program.

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Best Paper Award at the 8th IEEE International Symposium on Distributed Simulation and Real Time Applications (Oct 2004)

The paper, “Grid Services and Service Discovery for HLA-based Distributed Simulations”, by Wenbo Zong, Yong Wang, A/P Wentong Cai and A/P Stephen J Turner won the Best Paper award at the 8th IEEE International Symposium on Distributed Simulation and Real Time Applications held in October 2004 in Budapest, Hungary.

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NTU grabs both best paper awards at the inaugural IEEE Symposium on Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (Oct 2004)

Mr. Ho Sy Loi (left) and A/P Jagath Rajapakse (right) holding the best student paper award and the overall best paper award, respectively.

The paper written by Mr. Ho Sy Loi and A/P Jagath C. Rajapakse, titled, "Highly sensitive technique for translation initiation site detection" has won both best paper awards - the Best Student Paper Award and the Overall Best Paper Award, at the First IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology held in La Jolla, San Diego, USA, in October, 2004. The awards included plaques and cash awards.

The translation initiation site controls and regulates the initiation of translation processes downstream the DNA sequence, which convert the sequence into the corresponding protein sequence. The failure of the initiation of the translation results in the subsequent steps in synthesizing proteins redundant or impossible. Yet, there is no clear idea what biological factors cause some DNA portions to serve as translation initiation sites; regions that specify the translation initiation are usually poorly conserved with only a few identifiable positions. Pure experimental approaches are not expected to completely solve this problem due to their capital-intensive and time-consuming nature and are also applicable to small sequences.

The paper proposed a computational approach, using a hybrid of Markov models and neural networks, to detect translation initiation sites in cDNA, mRNA, or genomic sequences. The approach is capable of incorporating known biological contextual information and complex interactions of features surrounding the translation initiation sites. The technique correctly identified the initiation sites with 93.8% sensitivity and 96.9% specificity on a benchmark dataset, reporting the best performance to date. The new approach could provide an alternative future method to wet-lab experiments of finding translation initiation sites.

Mr. Ho Sy Loi, a Ph.D. candidate from the School of Computer Engineering (SCE), has worked under the supervision of A/P Rajapakse (SCE) on computational techniques to detect various signals, such as splice sites, translation initiation sites, and transcription start sites, on genomic sequences. A/P Rajapakse is also the founding and a current Deputy Director of the BioInformatics Research Centre (BIRC) at NTU.

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SCE Won Top Prize in Data Storage Unlimited Design Competition (Sept 2004)

From left: First prize winner: Lee Lim; Second prize winners: Naveen Peter and Samvita Padukone

A third-year student, Mr. Lee Lim took the first prize in the Data Storage Unlimited Design Competition organized by Seagate, Data Storage Institute and NTU in September 2004. Mr. Naveen Peter, another SCE student, and his team member, won the second prize. The competition attracted more than 50 entries, with 10 making it to the finals.

Mr. Lee Lim won the top prize with his innovative idea of using optical fibres and laser technology to increase storage capacity. The title of his project was "MicroGrid".

Mr. Lee Lim was also selected for the Sino-Singapore Undergraduates Exchange Programme (2004). This was a high profile programme initiated by then Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong and China's then Vice-President Hu Jintao. He was part of a team of 21 students selected by NTU to serve as Ambassadors to China.

Mr. Naveen Peter's team won the second prize with their project "Office Suite", which offers a centralized storage solution to manage the flow and storage of information for the modern-day office.

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SCE students developed mobile applications for the industry (Aug 2004)

1. Miss Liu Hui, a recent SCE graduate, designed a software (as part of her final-year project) that helps to avoid being caught in traffic Jam. The suggestion came from her project supervisor, Ast/P Yow Kin Choong, Sub-Dean, and she turned it into a winning software.

The software, "Traffic Cam", is a new wireless service that provides live traffic monitoring over mobile phones. Using mobile phones with "Traffic Cam", users can obtain traffic information anywhere, anytime. When the user launches "Traffic Cam" from his or her mobile phone, a request will be sent to an application server which in turn connects to a server at the Land Transport Authority (LTA). This server will then relay the requested image back to the user's mobile phone.

Miss Liu took about a year to conceptualise, design and develop "Traffic Cam". Two telecommunications companies, Motorola and DNA Communications, were attracted to her project and had offered the application on the new Motorola i830 phones.

Miss Liu graduated in 2004 with First Class Honours and she is currently a Software Engineer with Motorola Pte Ltd.

From left: Mr. Nikhil Khandelwal and Mr. Rahul Nath

2. Final year students Mr. Rahul Nath, Mr. Nikhil Khandelwal, and Mr Andreas Hadimulyono developed a wireless application "Buddy Finder" to help its user to locate his or her buddies anywhere in Singapore.

The 3 students, under the guidance of their supervisor, Ast/P Yow Kin Choong, Sub Dean, spent just a year to develop the "Buddy Finder". This application was first developed by Mr. Rahul Nath and Mr. Nikhil Khandewal, who worked on a freelance basis with Motorola to develop a mobile phone application while they were in their third year at NTU. Subsequently, Mr. Andreas Hadimulyono, who was on his industrial attachment programme with Motorola, joined them and the three developed Buddy Finder together.

This innovative application taps into contact lists in the user's mobile phone to show users the current location of their buddies in Singapore. In addition, "Buddy Finder" can also tell a user where his or her buddy is relative to the user's location. A zoom function provides further details.

"Buddy Finder" has been preinstalled in all new Motorola i830 phones and it will also be considered for later models.

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Ast/P Franklin Fu Cheng Peng and his final-year-project (FYP) students won the consolation prize of CoE exhibition (Mar 2004)

For left to right, Ms Patricia; Ms Quek Siew Guat; Ms Shuchi Mittal and Ast/P Franklin Fu Cheng Peng, and Prof Er Meng Hwa, Dean of College of Engineering and Deputy President 2

Ast/P Franklin Fu Cheng Peng and his final-year-project (FYP) students (Ms Shuchi, Ms Quek Siew Guat, Ms Patricia) won the consolation prize of CoE exhibition in March 2004. The FYP project is "advanced software agents in web- mining", aiming to make use of advanced research results on web mining to create a virtual community between the professors and students according to their academic interest. There were 3 gold and 5 consolation prizes.

Click on the undermentioned for the 2 powerpoint presentations of this project.

• Presentation 1
• Presentation 2

 

 

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A/P Alexei Sourin and his students won the consolation prize of the CoE (College of Engineering) exhibition (Mar 2004)

From left: Supervisor A/P Alexei Sourin, students Chua Sue Cheng Clara and Lim Sheng Chet Kelvin	Students Chua Sue Cheng Clara and Lim Sheng Chet Kelvin receiving the award from Prof Er Meng Hwa, Dean of College of Engineering and Deputy President 2

A/P Alexei Sourin and his final-year-project students Chua Sue Cheng Clara, Lim Sheng Chet Kelvin, and Kuo Yien Kee won the consolation prize of the CoE exhibition for the exhibit "Virtual Campus". There were 3 Gold Prizes and 5 consolation prizes this round.

For more information about the project, please click here.

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SCE student, Deepak Prabhakara, won the Operators' Award at SIMagine 2004 (Feb 2004)

Deepak Prabhakara (3rd from left) receiving his trophy and cash prizes at Cannes

Deepak Prabhakara had made his mark in SIMagine once again. He won the "TIM Operators' Award" of 5000 euros at SIMagine 2004, being placed joint 4th with 3 other teams. His project, SIMBlog, was selected by the jury and was presented at the 3GSM World Congress 2004 held in Cannes, France from 22 Feb 04 - 26 Feb 04.

SIMBlog brings the convergence of internet blogging and camera phones, giving mobile phone users the ability to create a personalized, interesting and unique website from a mobile phone - including text and multimedia. SIMBlog also enables location based blogging - recording the user's location along with his content to provide a more compelling blogging experience.

SIMagine 2004 is the 5th worldwide GSM and Java Card developer contests jointly organised by Axalto, a Schlumberger company, in association with Sun Microsystems and Samsung Semiconductors.

Click here for more details.

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NTU SCE teams won top awards at the Inaugural Grid Innovations and Applications Competition
(Jan 2004)

Gold Award (S$ 3000): Data Management for the IBP-based Data Grid
From left to right: Supervisor A/P Yeo Chai Kiat with Student Lim Teck Meng		Student Tang Ming

Silver Award (S$ 2000): Grid Application Deployment (GAD) Kit
From left to right: Students Ho Quoc Thuan and Dudy Lim		Supervisor Ast/P Ong Yew Soon

Two teams from the School of Computer Engineering won the Gold and Silver awards at the Inaugural Grid Innovations and Applications Competition held on 10 January 2004. The competition is jointly organized by the National Grid Office and the NTU Campus Grid and is sponsored by Sun Microsystems. The aim of the competition is to challenge students and researchers to come up with innovative applications that would run across a Grid infrastructure, widely touted as the Supercomputer of Tomorrow. Projects are opened to all tertiary students in Singapore and the judging criteria are Innovativeness, Technical Merit, Usefulness, Correctness, Documentation and Presentation.

The teams have to prepare a technical report for the judges, put up a poster as well as present and demonstrate the project live on the Grid. The panel of judges comprises experts from the National Grid Office, Institute of High Performance Computing (iHPC), Infocomm Development Authority (iDA) and Sun Microsystems.

Click here for more details.

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SCE Top Prize Winners in the 2002 Wireless Java Jam Competition Have Started their own Companies (Jan 2004)

From left to right: Prashant Goela, Romil Gupta, Dev Ramnane

Still fresh from their graduation in June 2003 from SCE, Prashant Goela, Romil Gupta and Dev Ramnane have already joined three of their friends to set up two companies: iMfinity and Snazza.

iMfinity is a technology consulting company and Snazza focuses on the commercialization of their winning application, Treasure Island. Development tools are built to allow businesses to advertise their products and services using mobile games and to gather market data from the customers. Their young company has already secured customers from both the public and private sectors.

Reported in

• Computer Times dated 10 Dec 2003 and 7 Jan 2004.
• Straits Times dated 2 Jan 2004.

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SCE alumni, Amit Bhatia and Rajesh Krishnan, made History in the World Universities Debating Championships 2004 (Jan 2004)

(From Left): Amit Bhatia, Rajesh Krishnan

Amit Bhatia and Rajesh Krishnan both belonging to CE Batch 98 have made history by being the first ever Asian team to make it to the finals of the World Universities Debating Championships since the competition started in 1981. They are both ranked within the top 10 among the hundreds of participants. This year's event is hosted by NTU with a record number of 304 teams from 29 countries taking part. More than 100 NTU students worked for two years to organise this prestigious event.

Reported by Straits Times dated 3 Jan 2004 and Sunday Times dated 4 Jan 2004.

 

Year 2003

PhD work of two SCE graduate students have earned recognition in the 14th International Conference on Genome Informatics, Yokohama, Japan (Dec 2003)

SCE graduate students under the supervision of A/P Jagath C Rajapakse have been awarded 50,000 yen each for the recognition as young scientists based on their work to be presented at the Fourteenth International Conference on Genome Informatics in Yokohama, Japan. The two papers which won the awards are:

- "Multi-class Support Vector Machines for Protein Secondary Structure Prediction" by M. N. Nguyen and J. C. Rajapakse
- "Splice site detection with a higher-order Markov model implemented on a neural network," by S. L. Ho and J. C. Rajapakse

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SCE Vice Dean (Research), A/P Lee Bu Sung Francis has been elected as the inaugural President of SingAREN by the Singapore network research community (Nov 2003)

A/P Lee Bu Sung Francis

Singapore Advanced Research and Education Network (SingAREN) which used to be a project under ASTAR funding, has embarked on a new chapter. SingAREN was registered as a society on 1 Oct 2003. The objectives of SingAREN are to advocate and champion advanced network applications and technology in Singapore; to be a platform for collective representation of the Singapore research and education networks community as well as to facilitate cost-competitive adoption of advance Internet technologies for the research and education community. In the inaugural AGM held on 11 Nov 03, A/P Lee Bu Sung Francis was elected as the first President of SingAREN.

 

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SCE students win Motorola Buddy Finder Challenge Competition (Nov 2003)

(From Left): Rahul Goela, Neha Kumar, Shilpa Arora and Atul Harkisanka

‘Catch me ... you can’ is the brainchild of four Computer Engineering students, Atul Harkisanka, Neha Kumar, Rahul Goela and Shilpa Arora. Under the mentorship of Ast/P Yow Kin Choong, the students developed an innovative application designed to help locate your buddies, display their locations on a map and even provide user with directions to get there. The application is designed to work on Motorola-iDen enabled mobile phones and stores the users’ GPS (Global Positioning Coordinates) on a centralized server. It helps the user maintain a contact list which shows the current locations of all his online buddies. It also shows the respective location of the two people on a Singapore map which can be zoomed to the required level of detail. A first of its kind application in Singapore, it includes instant messaging as part of the application.

Please click here for more information.

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SCE PhD student, Ye Minghua, is a Microsoft Research Asia Fellow for Year 2003 (Nov 2003)

Mr Ye Minghua, a graduate student of A/P Lau Chiew Tong is among the 28 awardees of the 2003 Microsoft Research Asia Fellowship. Minghua's research work on "Power efficient mobile ad hoc network" won him the fellowship in a competition which received almost a hundred highly qualified nominees. The award ceremony is held on 5th Nov 03 during the annual Microsoft Asia event, "Computing in the 21st Century" in Beijing. The fellowship includes a stipend of US$ 6000, a pocket PC and a fully paid 3-6 month internship at Microsoft Research Asia.

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Best Paper Award at 2003 European Simulation Symposium (Oct 03)

The paper “A Decoupled Federate Architecture for Distributed Simulation Cloning” by Dan Chen, Stephen John Turner, Boon Ping Gan, Wentong Cai and Junhu Wei has won the Best Paper Award at the 2003 European Simulation Symposium (ESS 2003). This work is part of a collaborative research project between the Parallel & Distributed Computing Centre (PDCC) and Singapore Institute of Manufacturing Technology (SIMTech) to develop the technology required for secure and robust distributed supply chain simulation. ESS is organized annually by SCS Europe, the European Council of the Society for Modeling and Simulation and this year the symposium was held in Delft, the Netherlands, in October 2003.

Click here for the full paper

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NBS-SCE team win SIFE World Cup Competition in Germany (October 2003)

The 6-member NTU team clinched the "Rookie of the Year" award at the International Finals, beating teams from France, Germany, Netherlands, Slovenia and Kenya. This is the first time the "Rookie" award is given out and it is awarded to countries taking part in the competition for the first time. The world cup was held in Germany, Mainz over the period 12-14 October 2003. The team has previously won the National SIFE (Students in Free Enterprise) Competition and is representing Singapore in the SIFE world cup.Over 37 countries participated in the world finals, with 31 competing teams and other observing teams. The United States won the overall championship.

(From Left): Gary Tan Qinghui (ACC2, NBS), Dev Ramnane (2003 SCE graduate), Jack Tan (ACC3, NBS and 2003 NTU SIFE Deputy President), Amrita Vijaykumar (2003 Business graduate and 2003 NTU SIFE President), Anand Shekhar (CE4, SCE), Lee Lit Hun (2003 Accountancy graduate)

Judging was on the basis of the innovativeness of the projects and the direct impact it had on the target audience. The NTU team won the vote of the judges by focusing on how the youth community can collaborate with the government to promote an entrepreneurial and risk taking mindset given the lack of natural resources.

According to Anand Shekhar, " The world cup was a tremendous cross cultural experience and it allowed us to make friends with people from far flung regions like Brazil and Africa. It also showed that collectively, we can change the world as the SIFE motto says."

As Anand Shekhar aptly summed up, " This has greatly inspired all of us and we hope to carry on next year to greater heights."

Please click the following for more information:

http://www.nbs.ntu.edu.sg/student/undergrad_portal/sife/sife_worldcup.asp http://www.sife.org/world_cup/Default.asp?ID=WC

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One of the first Singaporeans to be invited to the organising committee of the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries 2004: A/P Lim Ee Peng (Oct 2003)

A/P Lim Ee Peng has become the first Singaporean to be invited to be the program co-chair for the prestigious Joint Conference on Digital Libraries 2004 which is to be held at Tucson, Arizona, USA, 7-11 Jun 2004.

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NTU wins HP Grant for Wireless Project (Aug 2003)

NTU wins US$ 140,000 (S$ 250,000) HP Mobility Grant. 13 universities from across the Asia Pacific vied for the HP grant and NTU is the only winning entry from Southeast Asia.

The pilot project undertaken by NTU will give its students the option of studying without stepping into a classroom. They can listen to lectures, as well as receive and exchange lesson notes by using SMS (short messaging service) or MMS (multimedia messaging service) through such devices as personal digital assistants (PDA), laptops and mobile phones.

A 15-member team from School of Computer Engineering, led by Assistant Professor Yow Kin Choong will develop technology that allows 100 students to access and take part in lectures while on the move. The team comprises Ast/P Yow Kin Choong, Ast/P Chng Eng Siong, A/P Chia Liang Tien, Ast/P Foh Chuan Heng, Mr Leung Ho Yin and 10 students.

Reported in Straits Times and Business Times dated 13 Aug 03.

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SCE student won 2nd place in the first Java Masters Contest beating over 2000 contestants from all over the world (Aug 2003)

Deepak receiving his award comprising a Sun Blade 150 and an exclusive Siemens SL55 slider phone

SCE 2nd year student, Deepak Prabhakara won 2nd place in the inaugural Java Masters Contest organized by Sun Microsystems, Siemens Information and Communication Mobile and Siemens Mobile Acceleration. A total of more than 2000 students across the globe participated in the contest.

The title of his winning project is LBAlert Engine. This location based alert engine is a logical extension to the traditional time based scheduler and addresses the important need of having a mobile application that allows users to associate reminders with location as well as with time. Among other things, this service reminds mobile phone users of the upcoming birthdays of their friends when they are in the vicinity of certain shops.

Click here for full reports.

1. Report 1 (from Siemens Mobile web site)
2. Report 2 (from Javamasters web site)

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SCE Students in Winning Team of the National Students in Free Enterprise (SIFE) Competition
(Aug 2003)

SCE students, Dev Ramnane and Anand Shekhar join their counterparts from NTU Accountancy and Business School to win the SIFE Singapore Competition, beating teams from NUS and SMU.

The 9-member team will now represent Singapore and proceed to Germany to compete in the International Finals in Oct 2003.

Reported in Lianhe Zaobao dated 13 Oct 2003 and The New Paper dated 23 Sep 2003.

http://www.nbs.ntu.edu.sg/student/undergrad_portal/sife/sife_worldcup.asp
http://www.sife.org
http://www.nbs.ntu.edu.sg/student/undergrad_portal/SIFE/

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SCE Team won Top Prize in Business Plan Competition organised by Nanyang Technopreneurship Centre (Aug 2003)

SCE Team, Snazza,  won the Top Prize (Cash award of $15,000 and a Canon Digital Camera) of the Business Plan Competition organised by Nanyang Technopreneurship Centre and sponsored by Canon.

Team Snazza holding their Prize Cheque	With Prof. Lim Mong King, Deputy President (centre)

Snazza comprises the following members

• Dev Ramnane
• Prashant Goela
• Nishith Prabhakar
• Romil Gupta

The title of their winning entry is "Leading Edge Game Technology with a Focus on Advergaming."

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AutoShop came in Joint-Third at the Microsoft Worldwide Imagine Cup 2003 in Barcelona, Spain
(July 2003)

First:      US Nebraska University
Second: India Bombay University
Third:     Singapore NTU
             UK University of Hull

The competition at the world level was very intense with finalists from various countries.

More details can be found at

• http://www.imaginecup.com
• http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2003/jun03/06-30imaginecup.asp
• Lianhe Zaobao dated 27 Aug 03.

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Best Paper Award for SCE Dons (June 2003)

The paper “A Middleware Approach to Causal Order Delivery in Distributed Simulations” by A/P Stephen John Turner, A/P Cai Wentong and Mr Chen Ji has won the two SCE staff members and their student a SIWzie Award at the 2003 European Simulation Interoperability Workshop (Euro SIW 2003). Euro SIW is an event encompassing a broad range of model and simulation issues, applications and communities. It is organised by the Simulation Interoperability Standards Organisation (SISO) annually. Euro SIW 2003 was held in Stockholm, Sweden, in June 2003 and was attended by over 300 people from around the world.
The paper is on the Recommended Reading List of the SISO website
http://www.sisostds.org/conference/View_Public_Reading.cfm?conf=03EURO&Phase_ID=2

Click here for the paper.

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SCE teams win major awards at the Wireless Challenge Competition (March 2003)

To spur the growth of wireless applications, a Wireless Challenge competition was organised by the Singapore Information Technology Federation's Wireless Chapter together with Cisco Systems. It is supported by the InfoComm Development Authority, and sponsored by Hewlett Packard and Siemens. The competition was launched on 16 Jul 2002 culminating in the final presentation on 20 February 2003 and Awards Presentation on 14 March 2003.

In the Academic Category
The team Autoshop comprising SCE (School of Computer Engineering, NTU) students Anumeha Bisaria, Harishankar Vijayarajan, Kapil Vaidyanathan and Kunal Talwar won the grand prize of cash S$10,000. They also won the Cisco Systems Most Innovative WLAN Integrated Network Solutions Award with a cash award of S$5,000.

Another SCE team, Vector, comprising students Rajat Dev, Arun Jacob, Arun Kishore K K, Dev Ramnane and Nishith Prabhakar won the merit prize of S$5,000 and the Siemens Mobile Special Award for Location Services (S$3,500 worth of Siemens S55 handphones).

The team iName=Name comprising SCE senior tutor Woo Wing Keong and SCE student Chung York Wei won the Hewlett-Packard Best Regional Appeal Award, a cash award of S$2,000.

In the Open Category
One of our SCE alumni, Mr Jeffrey Ng Kim Ngee (class of 2001), is a member of the team which won the grand prize of S$10,000 in the open category. He represented his company, Meta Concepts, with the project entitled ECHO.

More information is available at http://www.wirelesschallenge.net

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SIMagine 2003 (Feb 2003)

Deepak Prabhakara was one of the 10 finalists from over 130 entries to the fourth edition of the SIMagine 2003 Worldwide GSM and Java Card Developer Contest. He won himself 2,000 Euros as a finalist to attend the Gala dinner at the 3GSM World Congress at Cannes on 19 February 2003. At the Gala dinner, he won the "Jury Award for Creativity" and was placed joint 5th placing with 4 other teams. He joined the rest of the 10 finalists on an all expenses paid study trip to Korea and China between 22nd Feb and 28th Feb 2003.

http://www.simagine.slb.com

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Autoshop won the Asia Microsoft.NET competition (Feb 2003)

Four final year SCE students have done NTU and Singapore proud by winning the first prize at the Asia Student .NET competition organised by Microsoft with their application titled A real-world solution to supermarket automation using Microsoft .NET Web Services. The regional competition was held in Beijing from 25 - 28 February 2003. The team was selected after they emerged champions at the national .NET competition held in January, where another NTU/SCE team was placed second.

This year's event attracted about 15,000 students in 3,000 teams from 11 countries in the region. They vied for the honour of representing their nation and school at the Asia Pacific competition in Beijing. It was a tremendous achievement on the part of the Singapore team to have beaten teams from top universities such as Tsing Hua University at the regional competition. The team won a fully sponsored trip to the Microsoft TechED 2003 in Barcelona, Spain, to compete in the Worldwide Student .NET Competition 2003 scheduled on 30 June to 4 July. They also walked away with an ACER Tablet PC each.

The 4 winning teams in Beijing are:

#1 Singapore - Nanyang Technological University, consisting of team members Kapil Vaidyanathan, Anumeha Bisaria, Harishankar Vijayarajan, Kunal Talwar.
#2 Taiwan - National Tsing Hua University
#3 China - Tsing Hua University
#3 India - Vivekanand Education Society's Institute of Technology

Special Innovation Award went to The Chinese University of Hong Kong.

More information is available at http://www.microsoft.com/asia/developer and the Business Times report dated 3 Mar 03 and Straits Times dated 22 Mar 03

Shown below are their photos taken during the award ceremony.

With Bill Gates at the award ceremony	With Microsoft's Education Technology Specialist, Mr. Norman Ho

The webcast is available at mms://nc.sina.com.cn/2003/02/2003-2-27-microsoft3.wmv.

They were also featured on the ChannelNewsAsia TV programme on Bright Sparks.

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Lua Eng Keong receives the Australia Asia Award (Feb 2003)

Mr Lua Eng Keong, a lecturer in the Division of Computer Communications and an alumnus of our School (1993), received the prestigious Australia-Asia Award at a ceremony at the Australian High Commission on 14 February 2003. This $150,000 bond-free scholarship is awarded to post-graduate students pursuing research studies in Australia, involving a new technology in which both Australia and Singapore share an expertise. Eng Keong will work towards a PhD degree with Professor Rod Tucker of the University of Melbourne in the area of photonics and optical computing.

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Autoshop - A Wireless Shopping Experience (Jan 2003)

Two teams from NTU's School of Computer Engineering have won the top two places in the local Microsoft Asia's .NET competition. Altogether, there were 32 submissions received in this competition, with 10 teams reaching the finals.

The top team, named Qoodos.NET, consists of Kapil Vaidyanathan, Harishankar Vijayarajan, Kunal Talwar and Anumeha Bisaria. Their project is "Autoshop", a wireless shopping experience that allows the customer to see their total shopping bill in real time as he/she puts items into the shopping cart. The customer can also pay for the items at the checkout counter without unloading the cart, thereby minimizing queue delays.

The second team, named Vector, consists of the SCE students Nishith Prabhakar, Dev Ramnane, Arun Jacob and Arun Kishore. They were members of the .NET winner in 2001.

Qoodos.NET will proceed to the Regional finals in Beijing held from 25th to 28th Feb 2003. If they come within the top 3 there, they will get a place in the World Finals in Barcelona, Spain.