By Fachri Mirza Muhammad
GOMBAK, 11 July 2018: For the first time, the International Islamic University Malaysia’s team on Monday (9 July) emerged first runner-up at the Innovate Malaysia Design Competition (IMDC) 2018: google track, held in Cyberjaya.
Innovate Malaysia Design Competition (IMDC) which started in 2011 is the most prestigious and largest design competition for third and final year undergraduate engineering, computer science and science/mathematics students. Over eight technology companies including Google, Intel, Keysight, MathWorks, Microsoft, SAS, SilTerra, and SOLIDWORKS worked together to co-organise the competition.
For this year, the competition has received over 900 signups when it was opened. Each team consisted of one to three members and was required to appoint a lecturer from their university to become their advisor throughout the competition.
The teams were categorised based on the region of the location of their universities: central, eastern, southern, and northern region. After the shortlisting process, the top 39 finalist teams were from various universities all over Malaysia.
The IIUM team which consisted of across the Kulliyah collaboration between engineering student Fahreza Al Ghifari and Information and Communication Technology (ICT) student Muhammad Wildan Zulfikar, supervised by Prof. Teddy Surya Gunawan, showcased their project entitled œEMOS which stands for Emotion of Speech.
œEMOS is an application that enabled recognition and detection of human emotions by only talking to it with the accuracy of 91% for three categories of emotions (Happy, Angry, Sad) and 80% for five categories (Happy, Angry, Sad, Neutral, Fear) with no language barriers.
The IIUM team is categorised in the central region (Kuala Lumpur). Initially, IIUM sent three teams to the competition but only one team managed to get to the final (the EMOS team). The EMOS team won RM2,500, while the first winner, University of Technology Malaysia (UTM), won RM4500.
Additionally, the EMOS team was awarded first place for Google track and excellence award at central region: Kuala Lumpur, 12-13 May 2018. ***