August 2004 5

C S I D C W I N N E R S

A student team from NorthCarolina State University haswon $20,000 for its first-place finish in the 2005 IEEEComputer Society Interna-

tional Design Competition. Their win-ning project, NEAT: Networks forEndangered Animal Tracking, com-bines GPS technology with wirelesssensor networks to produce a systemthat can track animal movements. Theteam is the first from the US to take thetop honor at CSIDC.

NC State’s NEAT system uses threearchitectural components: sensornodes, network nodes, and a base sta-tion. Sensor nodes are fitted on animalcollars and periodically gather GPSlocation information. Each sensornode stores data locally until it moveswithin range of a network node. Thestationary network nodes then useradio frequency modules to retrieve thedata, storing it until it is downloadedto a base station, which can then for-ward the information to a personalcomputer for storage and analysis.

The members of the NC State team,computer science majors DavidCoblentz, Dakota Hawkins, JonathanLewis, and fisheries and wildlife majorBen Noffsinger, will share the $20,000first-place prize. Noffsinger craftedthe ergonomic animal collar used tosecure the device to test subjects.Team leader Lewis developed thedatabase and user interface, whileCoblentz and Hawkins handled GPSinterfacing and network protocols,respectively.

A team from Poznan University ofTechnology, the home institution oflast year’s first-place team, received the $15,000 second-place prize withReadIT, a portable text-to-speechreader for blind people.

Politehnica University of Bucharestreceived the $10,000 third-place prizefor Nomad Positioning System, a user-centric navigation aid that providesroute information without using exter-nal input. A Politehnica team finishedfirst at CSIDC 2002.

CSIDC’s goal is to advance excel-lence in education by having studentteams design and implement computer-based solutions to real-world problems.Teams from China, Columbia, India,Pakistan, and the United Arab Emiratesalso competed in this year’s finals.

CSIDC 2005Nearly 200 teams entered the initial

phase of CSIDC 2005. An overalltheme, “Going Beyond the Bound-aries,” guided the entrants, though fewother restrictions were imposed beyonda $400 spending limit on hardware.

The CSIDC distinguishes itselfamong many other computer designcompetitions as being the only long-term, project-based challenge open toundergraduates.

Said CSIDC chair Alan Clements ofthe University of Teesside in England,“CSIDC is an excellent competition. Infact, it’s probably the best computingcompetition in the world, in terms ofscope, depth, and the opportunities itpresents to the students.”

Underscoring a goal of the competi-tion, to present a typical workplaceproject scenario to college students,Clements continued, “Student teamsfunction like industry here. We’reworking to improve the dialoguebetween university students and facultyand their counterparts in industry.”

Each year, competing teams gothrough three steps to reach the CSIDCfinals. First, teams submit initial pro-posals for judges to review. From thatreview, judges determine which projectsstand a legitimate chance of success.Many teams fail to pass this initial cut.

NC State Team Wins$20,000 First Prizeat CSIDC

North Carolina State University team members Ben Noffsinger, Dakota Hawkins, David Coblentz,and Jonathan Lewis, with judge Brian Robinson from ABB.

had an opportunity to inspect eachproject, question the competitors, andevaluate the execution of the proto-types. Several teams handed out pam-phlets and press releases promotingtheir projects.

The Sir Syed University team, forexample, produced a four-color bro-chure that detailed the capabilities andintent of their data glove-based BoltayHaath sign language system. Thebrochure also included a graphical rep-resentation of how the system wouldfunction in the field.

Said Suleman Mumtaz Ali, of the SirSyed team, “A vocally disabled personusing sign language is not able to com-municate effectively with those whoare able to hear. Our system convertsPakistan Sign Language into audiblespeech, based upon inputs from thedata glove. One of the benefits is thatthere is no need for an interpreter. Also,nonsigners do not need to learn signlanguage in order to understand thespeaker.”

However, due to travel and visacomplications, Ali was the sole mem-ber of the Sir Syed University team toarrive in Washington, DC before theend of the finals, which placed themout of contention for all but anHonorable Mention.

PresentationsOn day two of the CSIDC finals,

teams gave formal presentations beforea panel of judges. This year Susan K.Land of Northrop Grumman served aschair of the judging panel.

Said Land, who is also the IEEEComputer Society’s vice president forstandards activities, “All the teamswere highly motivated. The decisionprocess was not an easy one.”

Competitors at CSIDC reportedsome of the same sentiments. Said BenNoffsinger of the North Carolina Stateteam, “It’s very exciting, and a littlehumbling, to be here. These otherteams have created some outstandingsystems. Still, we’re proud, and wehope that our system may eventuallybe able to do some good.”

JUDGING CRITERIAJudges evaluate entries based not

only on their technical merit but alsoon their adherence to the year’s theme.Entries at CSIDC 2005 were judged onthe basis of the following criteria:

• originality, innovation, and socialusefulness of the project (30 per-cent);

• system specifications, algorithms,and implementation, including thedesign and construction of anytools that were developed in thecourse of the project (20 percent);

• achieving the design objective,including compensating for anyknown limitations (20 percent);

• creativity and ingenuity in thedesign and implementation (15percent); and

• usability, manufacturability, mar-ketability, and maintainability,including validation testing, per-formance measurements and eval-uations, and thoroughness (15percent).

The judging panel for the CSIDC2005 finals included panel chair Land,Computing Research AssociationExecutive Director Andy Bernat,Elizabeth Burd from the University of

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C S I D C W i n n e r s

As the live finals round draws near,the remaining teams submit 20-pagereports that provide prospectuses oftheir projects. A panel of judges theninvites the 10 most promising teams tocompete at the CSIDC finals.

CSIDC judge Elizabeth Burd of theUniversity of Durham, UK, praised theenergy of the competitors. Said Burd,“You feel lots of enthusiasm, lots ofinteraction. This competition providesa major focus for demonstrating inter-disciplinary activity and for promotinggroup work.”

PROJECT DEMONSTRATIONSDuring the two-day world finals

event, competitors have two opportu-nities to present their projects to thejudging panel. An informal day ofposter displays, including time forinterviews, precedes an intensive dayof scheduled presentations by eachteam. Winners are announced at anawards dinner on the second night.

ExhibitsOn 27 June, the first day of the

2005 CSIDC world finals, teamsshowcased their projects in displaysthat featured models, charts, bro-chures, and demonstrations of bothhardware and software. The judges

Yousif Ali (left), and teammate Ghaleb Al-Habian (second from right), of the American University of Sharjah, demonstrate their ABBAS accident simulation system for Sir SyedUniversity team mentor Aleem Alvi and CSIDC observer Sue Clements.

August 2004 7

CSIDC judges Sharon Morgan and ChristineSchober.

Judges Andy Bernat, Barry Fox, and Shakeel Mahate with Yousif Ali and GhalebAl-Habian of the American University of Sharjah team.

Doru Arfire, Catalin Ioana, Marius Muresan, BogdanLucaciu, and mentor Nicolae Tapus of the Politehnica University Bucharest team.

Computer Society President Gerald Engel and CSIDCchair Alan Clements.

CSIDC chair Alan Clements, Chun Yu, Christopher Hagen, Janice Wong, AndrewLundberg, and team mentor Zhao Zang of the Iowa State University team.

Judge Andy Bernat with Mayur Mudigonda, Ashwin Kumar, Arjun Seetharaman, and Karthik Srinivasan of the SSN College of Engineeringand Panimalar Engineering College team.

Computer Society President Gerald Engel andMicrosoft representative Janie Schwark.

Maozeng Li of the Beijing University of Technology teamand Computer Society Executive Director David Hennage.

CSIDC lead judge Susan(Kathy) Land.

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C S I D C W i n n e r s

Bogdan Lucaciu, and Marius Muresanwill share a $10,000 prize.

Clements presented the seven remain-ing teams with certificates of honorablemention and team prizes of $2,500.Those teams were American Universityof Sharjah, United Arab Emirates, forABBAS: Automobile Black Box forAccident Simulation; Beijing Universityof Technology, China, for Sporting Per-sonal Assistant; Iowa State University,US, for Lost in the Information World:

The Janix System; Shanghai JiaoTongUniversity, China, for Currahee Net-meeting System; Sir Syed University ofEngineering and Technology, Pakistan,for Boltay Haath: Pakistan Sign Lan-guage Recognition; SSN College ofEngineering and Panimalar EngineeringCollege, India, for VISION: Engineer-ing Solutions for the Visually Chal-lenged; and Universidad PontificiaBolivariana, Colombia, for ISPI: Intelli-gent System to Predict Inundations.

Two $3,000 Microsoft-sponsoredprizes were also presented to CSIDCfinalist teams. The Microsoft Award forSoftware Engineering went to theAmerican University of Sharjah for aproject demonstrating the “best appli-cation of good software engineeringprinciples to the design and testing of aprototype.” The Microsoft MultimediaAward, which recognizes the mostinteresting, innovative, exciting, andappropriate use of multimedia tech-nology in the finalist presentation, wentto Shanghai JiaoTong University.

INTERNATIONAL SCOPECSIDC organizers intend the com-

petition to be an opportunity for under-graduate students from around theworld to engage in direct competition,underscoring the global nature of theComputer Society’s mission. Of thisyear’s 10 finalist teams, only two were

Durham, Barry Fox of the British tech-nology press, Shakeel Mahate fromIBM, Sharon Morgan of the Universityof Manchester, Fernando Naveda ofthe Rochester Institute of Technology,Christine Schober of Honeywell, BrianRobinson from CSIDC sponsor ABB,and Marnie Salisbury of MITRE. Othervolunteer judges helped review the tworounds of reports submitted earlier inthe project year.

CSIDC 2005 RESULTSFollowing a full day of half-hour pre-

sentations, the judges had two hours todecide how to rank the top 10 teams.At the awards dinner on 28 June,CSIDC chair Clements announced thewinners, culminating with the an-nouncement that the North CarolinaState team had earned first-place honors.

“We haven’t seen anything like [thiscompetition] before,” remarked NorthCarolina’s Dakota Hawkins. “Thereare some amazing systems here. So it’sa huge honor for us to win.”

The second place Poznan UniversityReadIT system comprises a video camera mounted inside sunglasses, a processing device, a text-to-speechconverter, and an earphone. The sys-tem extracts text from the video streamand synthesizes it into human-likespeech that can be heard via earphone.

Poznan team members Jan Chmiel,Wojciech Switala, Olgierd Stankiewicz,and Marek Tluczek will share a$15,000 cash prize. Teams fromPoznan University have often finishedin the top 10 at CSIDC, including pre-vious wins in 2004 and 2001.

Third place honors went to a teamfrom Politehnica University, Bucharest,for the Nomad Positioning System.The system computes a traveled pathin real time and instantly reports visualmapping information to the user. It canbe used either for creating dynamicmaps of unknown locations—basedsolely on the user’s movements—or forguided navigation based on existingmaps. Politehnica University teammembers Doru Arfire, Catalin Ioana,

from the US. For many participants, thejourney to Washington is their first tripabroad. In addition, many of the com-petition’s finalists had to give oral andwritten presentations in a language notnative to their countries.

Mary Nell Coblentz, an observerfrom North Carolina State, noted thatthe teams from other countries “haveall done an incredible job. And whatmakes it really incredible is the languagebarrier that they had to overcome.”

“This is a great program for theSociety,” said IEEE Computer Societypresident Gerald Engel. “It really gen-erates enthusiasm for the profession. In10 years, I’d like to see some of theseparticipants back here as team mentors.In 20 years, I’d like to see one of themreplace Alan Clements as chair ofCSIDC. In 30 years, I’d like to see oneup here as president of the ComputerSociety.”

COMMITTED SUPPORTERSPrimary financial support for CSIDC

is provided by Microsoft, which hascommitted funding through the 2006competition year.

Microsoft representative JanieSchwark remarked, “Microsoft sup-ports CSIDC because it’s something wetruly believe in. These are some reallyamazing projects.”

Further support for CSIDC 2005was provided by Zurich-based engi-neering firm ABB.

T he IEEE Computer Society Inter-national Design Competitionrelies on scores of volunteer judges

throughout all stages of the contest. Forfurther information regarding CSIDC,including instructions for entering thecontest or volunteering as a judge, visitwww.computer.org/ CSIDC/. �

Teams at CSIDC compete for $68,500

in prizes.

Editor: Bob Ward, Computer, bnward@computer.org