KUCHING – Students from Swinburne Sarawak edged out participants from other universities in the recent Innovate Sarawak Design Competition 2021 by making a clean sweep of the top prizes in all three tracks.
In the competition, students were required to create any application-based projects that tackle real-world problems using electronic, mechanical, and software/mobile/cloud app solutions/technologies. There were three tracks in the competition namely the Mobile & Web track, the Internet of Things (IoT) track, and the Artificial Intelligence (AI) track.
In the Mobile & Web track, the Swinburne teams clinched both the first and third prize. The first prize went to Isaac Asante for his project titled ‘Development of a Low Budget COVID-19 Self-Quarantine Monitoring System’. Under the guidance of Associate Professor Dr Lau Bee Theng, the duo developed a platform called ‘Trackia’, a fool proof COVID-19 quarantine monitoring system consists of a location-tracking native Android application, a web application serving as an administrative dashboard, and third-party analytics tools.
Meanwhile, the project ‘A Web-based Learning and Development Platform for Employee Engagement and Performance’ by students Toh Kah Hie, Elwin Chan Kok Wei and Malika Arjun Liyanage won the third prize. Supervised by Dr Brian Loh Chung Siong and Dr Vong Wan Tze, the students developed a platform based on industry requirements that enables human resource managers to monitor employees’ learning progress while allowing employees to improve their professional skills as well as knowledge and experience within their organisation.
In the IoT track, Albe Chai Bing Zhe under the mentorship of Associate Professor Dr Chua Hong Siang emerged champion for his project titled ‘Health Monitoring System of Tomato Plant with Image Recognition and Machine Learning’. This was proposed as an IoT solution to help farmers in monitoring the environment parameters, and predicting the health condition of the tomato plant with the object detection and classification models.
With their project titled ‘Computer-aided Drug Discovery of AAK1 and GAK Dual-target Inhibitors to Stop SARS-CoV-2 Viral Entry into Host Cells’, student team comprising Lilian Siaw Yung Ping, Kong Hao Qing and Yeong Kah Ho was awarded the first prize in the AI track. The students who were guided by Dr Xavier Chee Wezen constructed a Quantitative Structure-Activity Relationship (QSAR) algorithm to identify potential drugs that could block the entry of coronavirus into the human cells. Additionally, the team also clinched the Excellence Award as the overall champion for Innovate Sarawak.
Innovate Sarawak is part of the Innovate Malaysia 2021, the largest design competition opened to all penultimate or final-year Malaysian undergraduates. The objectives of Innovate Malaysia are to promote innovative culture in engineering design work, tackle real-world problems with practical engineering solutions and identify local engineering or science talents.
Swinburne Sarawak mid-year intake is now open for application. Classes for degree programmes will commence on 30 August and 27 September 2021. For programme details, contact our Education Counsellor via WhatsApp at 019-819 6353 or email to study@swinburne.edu.my.
For more information about Swinburne Sarawak, visit its website www.swinburne.edu.my, Facebook page (@swinburnesarawak), Instagram (@swinburnesarawak), Twitter page (@Swinburne_Swk) or YouTube channel (Swinburne Sarawak).