Curtin Sarawak electronic and communication engineering student project enters finals of IET Innovation Awards

Miri – 14 November 2013 – A student project by Victor Lau Pik Teck, a third-year Electronic and Communication Engineering student of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, School of Engineering and Science at Curtin University, Sarawak Malaysia (Curtin Sarawak), has made it into the finals of the 2013 IET Innovation Awards under the ‘Intelligent Systems’ category.

The IET Innovation Awards presented by the worldwide Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) are aimed at giving recognition to the most outstanding innovations across 15 categories spanning science, engineering and technology. The awards are highly competitive with over 400 entries from some 30 countries received each year.

The IET is the largest multi-disciplinary professional engineering institution sharing and advancing knowledge to promote science, engineering and technology across the world. It is also the professional home for life for engineers and technicians, and a trusted source of essential engineering intelligence.

Nigel Fine, Chief Executive of the IET said, “These awards recognise the most outstanding innovations across science, engineering and technology celebrating the contribution made by engineers and technicians to enhance people’s lives everywhere. The IET is passionate about promoting engineering excellence and the Innovation Awards are a great opportunity to showcase some of the very best work taking place around the world.”

Lau’s project faced stiff competition from those from outstanding international companies and universities such as Qualcomm, AT&T, Imperial College London, National Instruments, ABB, Heathrow Airport Limited and BBC R&D. It was the only one from this region that made it into the finals, an achievement that was acknowledged in the IET webpage (http://conferences.theiet.org/innovation/shortlist/index.cfm).

“We are very proud of Victor’s achievement. It reaffirms our reputation as a leading higher education provider in Malaysia, particularly in the area of engineering, and shows that we are on par with the other leading universities,” said Professor Ir. Yudi Samyudia, Deputy Pro Vice-Chancellor of Curtin Sarawak.

He added that it was testimony to the quality and excellence of the university’s teaching and learning, academic programmes, research output, staff calibre, and the quality of its graduates and their employability.

Lau’s ‘Text to Speech Smart Reader’ project involved developing a low-cost text-to-speech smart reader to assist blind or visually-impaired people to read documents, newspapers, journals and articles by themselves. It can be used for language enhancement among children. The reader features a camera, hearing kit and Raspberry Pi containing image processing algorithm.

Lau related that his overriding idea was to apply the latest technology to help those with special needs and came up with the idea of an affordable smart text-to-speech reader using raspberry pi, a webcam and headset.

“Image processing is something in my course units that I found very interesting and I wanted to learn all I could about it. I sought the guidance of my supervisor, Dr. Garenth Lim, and he guided me through the project.

I started with simple alphabet recognition, then multiple word recognition. I believe that doing everything from scratch helps us understand how a basic system works and how we can improve on it. In the future, I would like to enhance the algorithm coding to make the system more robust and smarter,” he remarked.

Dr. Garenth Lim, meanwhile, said, ”Curtin Sarawak’s engineering students have proven time and time again that they have the potential to win international competitions. I always encourage my students to participate in national and international competitions to hone their independent learning, self-motivation and other soft skills and build a competitive edge.”

MAKING CURTIN SARAWAK PROUD: ECE student Victor Lau Pik Teck.