Electronic Engineering Department, The Chinese University of Hong Kong - CHAN Wai Nang (Prof. T. Lee)

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CUHK Engineering Students Win Regional Championship in Microsoft Imagine Cup 2004 Competition.

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A student team from the CUHK Faculty of Engineering has won the Hong Kong Regional Championship in the Microsoft Imagine Cup 2004 Competition. The team consists of: CHAN Wai Nang(Dept. of EE), TSE Hok Man (Dept. of IE) and WONG Po Yan (Dept. of SEEM) advised by Professor Helen MENG (SEEM). The team receives a cash prize of HKD120,000 awarded by Microsoft Hong Kong and will be representing Hong Kong to compete with other regional champion teams in the Microsoft Imagine Cup 2004 World Finals in Brazil in July 2004.

The team has creatively designed and implemented a mobile, multimodal and multilingual system called Portable Shopping Companion (PSC) which is a distributed software system that runs on a mobile PDA client. The system supports bilingual (English and Chinese) speech recognition and text-to-speech synthesis, automatic bi-directional English-Chinese machine translation, speaker verification (i.e. voiceprint security) and location-awareness using Wi-Fi hotspots. The system enables the user (shopper) to browse through product web pages, locate stores in an arcadewith the product in stock and help the user navigate a big arcade for particular stores. The system can also serve as an interpreter between an English-speaking tourist and a Chinese speaking salesman using real-time speech-to-speech translation technologies. The speaker verification component of PSC evolved from the final year project of Chan Wai Nang under the supervision of Prof. Tan Lee in the Dept. of EE.

This project is supported by the United College Budding Scholars Exchange Program (with exchange partner being University of Washington, Seattle) as well as the Human-Computer Communications Laboratory, CUHK Department of Systems Engineering and Engineering Management .

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