IN THIS ISSUE
UCSI Wins BIG at National IP Awards 2008
Kuala Lumpur, 26 April 2008- UCSI (University College Sedaya International) students from its School of Engineering won three out of five awards at the annual National Intellectual Property Awards 2008.
All the three entries sent in by UCSI won a prize. The students won the 1st, 3rd & 4th prizes in the institutions of higher learning category. A total of 26 entries were received in this category.
Dr. Jimmy Mok, Head of the Centre for Research Excellence at UCSI and event advisor said, “At UCSI, learning outcomes are of utmost importance. The concept for each invention was conceived collectively by the advisors and the students. The advisors guided the students in the right direction when they faced problems. Once the students were on track, their inventiveness took over and they were able to create these winning entries.”
The winning invention that secured first place was the Distance Monitoring System (DiM System) collectively developed by students, Mimi Iriana (Leader) and Joshua Tan Wai Kiat. DiM is a distance monitoring system that allows parents to monitor and track how far their children have strayed from them. The DiM system alerts parents with a beeping sound. The frequency of the beeping sound decreases as the child moves farther away from his/her parents.
Mimi explained that, “The DiM alerts parents when their children have strayed beyond a safe distance from them. The sensors are inserted into cute toys which can be pinned onto the child’s clothes or hung as a key-chain on the child’s bag. ”
Third place winners, Tan Aik Chun (Leader), Yeap Khai On and Tee Kwee Siang came up with their product, the Portable Traffic Light (Portraff), after experiencing traffic congestion due to faulty traffic lights.
Portraff, is a four-sided traffic light that can be programmed to handle traffic at four-way junctions. Tan said that the invention enables the city council to temporarily replace faulty traffic lights and ease the burden of traffic police in diverting traffic flow at road junctions during peak hours.
Those who have a
limited wardrobe and need to wear their favourite items of clothing
frequently (e.g. uniform) will be pleased with the invention of Wong
Ying Qian (Leader), Goh Yong Hoe and Leong Jun How. It won the 4th spot
in the competition.
The device, named the Drying Revolver (Dryver) is designed to dry different types of clothes and comes with a clothes hanger that has two fans and a light bulb. The fan circulates the hot air from around the bulb to the clothing hung on the hanger, drying it in the process. The drying mode and time can be set by the user.
Said student advisor Rodney Tan, “This is the 3rd time UCSI students have won in this category. Engineering students at UCSI are exposed to new technologies such as the Zilog Z8 Encore! XP microcontrollers and are encouraged to be innovative in creating workable and commercially viable inventions. These, I believe, are the reasons that enabled students to make an almost clean sweep of the awards available.”
All the students expressed their interest in participating in next year’s competition with even better inventions.
Mimi Iriana and Joshua Tan Wai Kiat posing with the Distance Monitoring System (DiM)
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