Three SAS teams won the 1st prize, Best Java Application Award and a Merit Award from this competition sponsored by Sun and Netscape Alliance.

The 1st prize went to the team consisting of Ong Kok Leong, Liew Chin Chuan, Tan Beng Suang and Zhao Lei (led by Asst Prof Ng Wee Keong). The Best Java Application Award went to the team consisting of Sneha N Shah, Jayanth Nagarajan and John I C Gomes (led by Asst Prof Clement Chia). The team consisting of Zhang Jianfeng and Sim Han Seah (led by Assoc Prof Yeo Chai Kiat and Assoc Prof Francis Lee) won the Merit Award.

Their project titles were:

• ABECOS: Agent-Based Electronic Commerce System
• Intelligent Online Network
• Distributed Interactive Simulation Systems

The 1st prize winning team won a cash award of $2000 and a trip to the JavaOne conference.

CrayQuest (Oct 1999)

A team representing SAS Centre for Advanced Information Systems won the Gold Award of $8,000 in the CrayQuest organised by the Institute of High Performance Computing and SGI Computer. The competition was open to all and has attracted twice as many teams this year. The SAS team consisted of students Vee Voon Yee, Ye Rong and Shah Sneha. The supervisor is CAIS Director Assoc Prof. Hsu Wen Jing.

Lecturing via Online Video Conferencing (Sept 1999)

Lecture via Internet in LT20 NTU

For lecturers, regardless of their physical locations, so long as they are armed with a laptop and a video camera, lectures will proceed. A/P Francis Lee Bu Sung has demonstrated the feasibility of remote lecturing when he was in Canberra attending conferences. He held his usual Computer Networks lecture to his 300 third year students in LT20, NTU on Tuesday 21 Sep 99 from the Australian National University via video conferencing. In this way, lecturers do not have to cancel classes while they are away overseas.

Reported in Straits Times dated 14 Sep 99.

IEEE/IEICE ATM Workshop '99, "Outstanding Paper from Academia Award" (May 1999)

Mr Jeremy Ping Chew, a graduate student working with Dr Anil Gupta, has been bestowed with the "Outstanding Paper from Academia Award" and a cash of Yen 50,000 at an IEEE workshop. The details of the paper are:

Jeremy Ping Chew and Anil K. Gupta, "Active Fairness: Improved Fairness with Dynamic VC Weights and Generalized Fairness in the ATM ABR Service," IEEE/IEICE ATM Workshop '99, Kochi-city, Japan, May 24-27, 1999.

Alarm System to Make Lift Safe (May 1999)

Under the supervision of Dr Maylor Leung and Dr Hui Siu Cheung, final year computer engineering student Pong Chen How, together with MSc. students Xiao Ping and Wang Fudong, have developed an intelligent lift which will trigger an alarm if it detects anything unusual happening in the lift. Armed with an electronic eye (i.e. a video camera), visual data are captured and fed to a computer via Internet. The video data are analysed by an intelligent software to detect if there is any unusual event. In which case, an alarm will be raised at the security guard console and the guard can zoom it on the lift concerned. Dr Maylor Leung hit upon this idea to make lift safer after reading about the spate of lift robberies.

Report in Straits Times dated 25 May 99.

Book Hunt - Swap or Buy Old Books Online (Feb 1999)

Computer Engineering students, Ling Tao and Chen Xudong won the Campus Tech Wave, a program-writing contest organised by Sybase and Sun Microsystems with their project entitled 'Book Hunt'. Book Hunt facilitates the trading of books online among students and it will be replacing the current manual process, handled by the NTU Students' Union, and various faculty and hostel clubs. They won themselves a trip to Florida.

Reported in Straits Times dated 6 Feb 99.

NTU team represented by Dr Wong Kok Cheong, Director, Centre for Graphics and Imaging Technology, with team members Mr Lim Swee Kim, Mr Albert Goh Lian Lai, Mr Low Boon Hean and Dr Ramakrishnan Balajee, won the first prize in this competition opened to all tertiary institutions in Singapore.

The prize consists of an IBM IntelliStation M Pro Professional Workstation and a 1-week internship at Disney Animation Studio, Sydney, is worth more than $17,000.

IEEE Computer Society, Lance Stafford Larson Outstanding Student Paper Award (May 1998)

The paper, "Bi-directional Motion Estimation via Vector Propagation," was judged on technical content, writing skill, and overall presentation excellence. The paper was the work of Mr Showbhik Kalra's Accelerated Honours Project, supervised by Dr. Chong Man Nang. Mr Showbhik Kalra completed his B.A.Sc. (Computer Engineering) in Nov 1997 and is currently a research engineer at the NSTB Centre for Signal Processing. Click here for full report.

ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest World Finals (Feb 1998)

Our team which consisted of Mr Vee Voon Yee, Ramachandran Sreenam and Mahadevan Bharath, came in 11th in the world and 2nd in Asia. Fifty-four teams took part in the Finals held at the United States (Atlanta, Georgia) on 28 February 1998. Click here for a look at our team in Atlanta.

Outstanding Paper Award (Dec 1997)

Dr Quek Hiok Chai is a Senior Lecturer from Software Systems Division. The paper won the outstanding paper award by the Association for the Advancement of Computers in Education (AACE, USA) at the International Conference on Computers in Education:

CrayQuest 96 (Jan 1997)

The project, "High Performance MOS VLSI Switch Level Circuit Simulation on the Cray T94 Supercomputer", won the Gold Award of $8,000 in the CrayQuest ‘96 organised by the National Supercomputing Research Centre and the Cray Research. The competition was held in Singapore. The NTU team consisted of Mr Alfred Heng, the supervisor and two undergraduate students, Md Javer Absar and Manish Bhardwaj. Mr Alfred Heng is a Senior Lecturer in the Division of Software Systems.