CUHK Teams Won All Major Awards
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Microsoft's Web Services Xcellence Award Competition

CUHK Teams from the Computer Science and Engineering Department won all the major prizes in Microsoft's Web Services Xcellence Award Competition, including the best .NET application of the year award in the student category, and the First prize in the professional category. They won a total of HK$190,000 cash prizes, which is more than half of the total prizes in this competition, plus reserch trips to Beijing and other tangible gifts. The award ceremony was held on 24 October 2002.

The wining team of the student category is XVIP. They are advised by CSE professor Prof. LYU, Rung Tsong Michael and their team members are Ngai Cheuk Han (Edith), Chan Pik Wah (Pat), Lo Man Kit (Marcus), and Leung Pui Yin (Carol). Pat and Edith are CSE M Phil students, while Marcus and Carol are CSE FYP students. They have won the two prizes in this competition, including The Best .NET Application of the year award and Most Innovative Application Award. The Winner of professional category is Sam Sze, he was graduated from CUHK since 1996 and he currently is a staff in VIEW. All winners are from VIEW technologies Laboratory, a laboratory joinly sponsored by CSE/IE/SEEM departments.

Microsoft Hong Kong has joined IT leaders from the Hong Kong SAR Government and the Hong Kong Computer Society (HKCS) to hold the competition "Web Services Xcellence Award," which designed to foster the development of the next wave of enterprise services and applications. Initiated by HKCS, the award aiming at encouraging university students and professional developers to create leading-edge Web Services on the Microsoft(r) .NET platform, has the full support of Microsoft Hong Kong and the Information Technology Services Department.

Winners of the competition were awarded the following prizes. For Web Services Xcellence Award, they have First Prize, Second Prize and Third Prize For Student Developer Xcellence Award, they have The Best .NET Application of the year Award, Best XML Web Services Peer-to-Peer Application Award, Best Graphical Focused, Application (games) Award, Best Mobile Application Award and Most Innovative Application Award.

The Web Services Xcellence Awards and the Student Developer Xcellence Awards were being judged by a distinguished and expert panel including executives from Information Technology Service Department, Hong Kong Computer Society, universities and Microsoft Hong Kong. Judging criteria included creativity, practicality, architecture, local market relevance and Technical excellence. This year they have 16 submissions from professional developers and 18 entries from academia.

The winner team of student category is XVIP and the project title is XVIP (XML-Based Video Information Processing System), which is a system providing end-to-end solution from raw video input, information extraction, to video searching and streaming delivery. It has numbers of key functionalities, including automatic understanding of video input by speech recognition (Microsoft SAPI), on-screen character recognition and other data extraction and enrichment techniques.Through video understanding by machine, the video information can therefore be indexed and become searchable. It also provides a Video Search Engine front-end for Web and WAP users of various device types. The users can search their own favorite video segment.

The Winner of professional category, Sam Sze, won with the project called Digipoint.NET. DigiPoint "§A·QÂI" is an application for deployment in Photo Shops, like Kodak, Fuji and Fotomax in Hong Kong. Simply speaking, DigiPoint is software for customers to browse and mark their own digital photos for development at the counter. The customer can take in any storage cards in any formats. Meanwhile, the selected photo files will be automatically arranged for the staff to work on.