Bulletin Autumn‧Winter 2004

Hong Kong Champs from CUHK Do Themselves Proud at Microsoft's International Software Design Competition A team of three engineering students f r om the Chinese Un i v e r s i ty was ranked top 12 in the world championship of Imagine Cup 2004, Microsoft's International Software Design Competition. A team of three CUHK engineering students became one of 12 finalists in the Imagine Cup 2004 w o r l d championship organized by Microsoft in Brazil in July. The team had earlier defeated 19 local teams to w in the Imagine Cup 2004 (HK) competition, thus gaining the right to compete i n the world championship w i th 38 other regional champions. The CUHK team comprising Dexter Chan (middle) (Electronic Engineering), Edmond Tse (left 2) (Information Engineering), and Cheryl Wong (left 1) (Systems Engineering and Engineering Managemen t) entered the software design category w i t h their o wn software: Portable Shopping Companion (PSC). Building upon Hong Kong's reputation as a shoppers' paradise and the g r ow i ng number of visitors to the city, the software aims at ma k i ng the shopp i ng ma ll experience more convenient. Amo ng the 12 teams who made it to the finals, only two were from Asia. Students and Alumni Win IT Excellence Awards T wo d o c t o r al students and t wo recent graduates of the Faculty of Engineering were awarded IT excellence awards by the Hong Kong Computer Society in August 2004 in recognition of their outstanding achievements in IT application and the innovative IT technologies they developed. Zensis Ltd., a C U HK spin-off company founded by two 2002 CUHK graduates, won the gold award in the SME product category w i th their first product PhotoRite TM , an automatic digital photo enhancement software. The first fully automatic software of its kind in the world, it has already been ported on to a variety of leading mobile phone brands and digital camera platforms. Two Ph.D. students wo r k i ng in the Video over I n t e r nEt and Wireless Techno l og i es Laboratory of the Faculty of Engineering seized one of on ly t wo bronze awards i n the post- secondary category with Video2MMS TM . (No gold or silver award was given out in this category.) This is an automatic video information processing and conversion system for multimedia messaging service w h i c h emp l o ys i n n o v a t i ve v i d eo information processing and MMS condensation technologies to automate the preparation process for supplying video content to mobile phones. The judges commented that the system ‘ i n n o v a t i v e ly uses the latest technology to implement an application w i th real utility'. Chinese University Bulletin Autumn • Winter 2004 66