Text & Photo: Campus Reporter Gonzales Wu
Have you ever wondered what is the advantage of studying information technology at the University of Macau (UM)? What is the career prospect for graduates of this major? The answers can be found at the exhibition of students’ graduation projects.
UM’s Department of Computer and Information Science recently organised the Final Year Project (FYP) Demonstration Session 2017. The event was successfully held at the learning commons of the Faculty of Science and Technology (FST). The annual exhibition hosted all the bachelor projects created individually or in groups by the department’s fourth-year students. It is also the only bachelor project exhibition of the FST. This year, a total of 25 student groups presented their projects on different topics in the area of computer science, including natural language processing, machine learning, computer vision, and digital cryptocurrency. During the event, the students introduced their projects to members of the faculty and the general public.
Creative Projects
During the event, Jeremy Zhu, a fourth-year student, demonstrated his team’s low-cost authentication system. The system was designed to scan palm vein distribution of a user in order to either find the person’s identity or check whether he is the right person. Users need to first register their palm vein into the system, and then they can log into the system just by putting their palm vein on the scanner. A UM Reporter tried the system multiple times and found the system was accurate enough, despite the fact that there were seconds of delay before the system outputted the result of verification.
Meeting the Needs of Society
Anson Leung developed a digital cryptocurrency wallet for Android together with another student Kelvin Wong. This application can supports both Bitcoin and Ethereum, two digital cryptocurrencies, at the same time, while existing applications on the market can only support one currency. The app can also provide a market view of those currencies. Anson added that this application would provide a convenient way to transfer money via QR code in addition to the traditional method by typing the receiver’s wallet address.
A New Innovative Technology
Unlike most of the students who started their projects from scratch, Felix Tong released UM-iMethod2, an input method designed for Chinese-Portuguese translators, based on the original version of UM-iMethod created in the past by other students. He explained that his 2nd-generation input method added not only Chinese-Portuguese translation capability, but also a function to predict part of speech. According to Tong, unlike traditional machine translating websites, this input method allows users to pick the candidate words they want in order to produce a desirable result, which helps to reduce the number of times needed for checking dictionaries.
The Final Year Project Demonstration Session also showcased projects focused on indoor localisation with computer vision, research based on data analytics and machine learning, as well as applications released for the use of the general public after analysing their needs.
Say No to Misconception of Being a Nerd
FST Associate Professor U Leong Hou is the coordinator and curator of the exhibition. He said that people usually have the misconception that computer science students are nerdy. ‘The exhibition gave the students an opportunity to break this misconception and showcase their various skills,’ said Prof U. He added that most of the projects took at least a year to complete and the exhibition gave students a chance to showcase their work. The event also helped faculty members to understand students’ projects and give a fair evaluation.
UM Website：www.umac.mo
