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National ICT R&D, for the first time, organized a competition of Final Year Projects at Islamabad. Diverse projects from all over the country were displayed owing to their innovation and commercialization opportunities. These projects were shortlisted from thousands of projects funded by ICTRD in the past couple of years.
The event was organized under National ICT Grassroots Research Initiative (NIGRI) which aims to promote, enable, and encourage R&D culture at the grassroots level by funding relatively high caliber R&D projects.
Ever since the launch of NGIRI in 2011, 72 public and private sector participating universities submitted 5,538 Final Year Project proposals out of which 2,067 FYPs received an overall grant of worth PKR 130 million.
The awards ceremony was carried out by the Minister of IT, Anusha Rehman, where a cash prize of Rs. 400,000 was awarded to 1st position holder Zain Qasir and Hamza PNEC NUST for their project: Power Watch Dog. The second position was won by Ali Gul from Balochistan University of Information Technology with a cash prize of Rs. 300,000 for his project: Smart Helmet for Coal Mines. Whereas, the 3rd position with the cash prize of Rs. 200,000 was won by Owais Ahmed and Hassan Cheema university of Faisalabad and his team for their project: Design and simulation of fire tube boiler using PLC to avoid industrial boiler accidents.
Supervisors of above mentioned winning FYPs received cash prizes of PKR 100,000/- PKR 75,000/- and PKR 50,000/- respectively.
Speaking on the occasion, Mr. Yusuf Hussain CEO National ICT R&D Fund said that universities from across Pakistan participated in this event, not just Lahore, Karachi and Islamabad’s elite universities. He thanked the students, supervisors, and judges.
Here is a closer look at some of the shortlisted projects which caught our attention.
1. Currency Notes Recognizer
It is an Android application to capture an image of the currency note and identify it’s amount for Dollar, Pound, Euro and Pakistani rupees. It can be used by blinds as well as to identify the fake currency.
2. Brain Imaging for different applications
This application is a FPGA-based embedded brain imaging system for wireless real-time medical diagnostic, military and gaming applications.
3. Plantico
Farming is an important sector in many countries like Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh, as most people depends directly and indirectly on it. Among all corps, Cotton is a main cash crop in Pakistan which gives more income to the farmer. The diseases on the cotton are crit which makes the sharp decrease in the production of the cotton. The application named as PLANTICO aims to use Image Processing techniques to detect disease and provide a solution. It will save time, effort and money of farmers.
4. Microwave bandpass filter
The broadband bandpass filter is designed using interdigital parallel coupled lines. The fabricated filter can be used in existing and upcoming wireless communication systems for spectrum shaping frequency multiplexing.
5. Brain Controlled Wheel Chair
The development of a brain-controlled wheelchair that can be controlled using signals from the Human brain. The wheelchair is useful for people who has paralysis.
6. Smartphone
An IoTs-enabled Neurotech-based smart home for fully paralyzed. It is also an android-based solution for normal people to control electrical appliances, supervise children and detect intrusion.
7. Mine Dispensing Vehicle
The objective of this work is to develop an unmanned system, capable of dispensing land mines without human intervention in order to minimize human casualties resulting from the conventionally used mine dispensing techniques.
8. Smart sensor for health
A wearable with app compatibility for constant monitoring of vitals for Heart failure patient to help patients to monitor themselves, keep track of their vitals that are ECG, heart rate, temperature, and activity. Alongside allowing the patients to keep track of their diet which helps in fitness monitoring and cardiac rehabilitation, set reminders for appointments, measuring blood pressure and medicine intake.
9. Urdu finger reader
It is an app that helps users to read Urdu printed text in real time using a camera.
10. Power watchdog
The project aims to monitor Distribution Transformer’s health parameters, and control its ON/OFF state remotely 24/7 and would also have an interactive GUI for data visualization to take corrective measures.
11. News portal
The News Portal app will help the reader to read with utmost ease, also analyze and compare news from leading newspapers of Pakistan. News portal provides brief and detailed news summaries, sentiment and frequency analysis and read out aloud functionality currently for Dawn, The News, and The Nation newspapers.
12. Virtual Dressing Room
A virtual dressing room where one can try clothes without the need of changing rooms by standing in front of a big LCD screen to check all the collection of that brand virtually fitting on you.
13. Simulation of Fire Tube Boiler
Simulation of fire tube boiler emphasis upon several controlling techniques as water level monitoring, pressure level, error diagnostics along with correction of industrial parameters.
14. Ultrasound blind walking stick
Ultrasonic Blind Walking stick design for visually disabled people for improved navigation.
15. Fauji Copter
The Fauji Copter is designed to handle Mission Planning For Regional Surveillance with Live Video Transmission.
16. Talking lights
Talking lights would be used to connect to the internet and to receive notifications. This project is an endeavor to a reality that eradicates WiFi and instead uses the groundbreaking concept called LiFi.
17. Smart Eye
The smart eye is an Alternate Eye for visually impaired people using Internet of Things.
18. Anti-Theft distribution system
The anti-theft distribution system is designed to automatically detect and control theft of electricity in form of illegal connection from the distribution line.
