Finding Innovative & Creative Solutions for Society (FICS) 2020 concluded last week in NUST Jinnah Auditorium, a competition featuring various projects aligned under Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to address problems in society. The Closing Ceremony was attended by Rector NUST Lt. General (Retd) Naweed Zaman along with other high ranking officials from across the university as students put their projects on display which have been funded by various industry organizations.
Cyber Guard clinched the top prize and the project was made by Dawood Aijaz who is a student of Military College of Signals, a constituent college of NUST and it was supervised by Dr. Waleed bin Shahid. The basic idea is that Cyber Guard will monitor and protect the pilferage and exfiltration of sensitive organization data, either at rest or motion. Another interesting project was Detect-o-Drowsiness which aims to reduce number of accidents on the roads. As per the abstract, around 27,081 traffic accidents led to death just in 2019. Drowsy drivers are the most common cause of these accidents. This project will detect drowsiness by Tracking Eyes and analysing the brain activity of the driver. The team lead for this project is Attia Nafees Ul Haq from Research Center of Modelling and Simulation (RCMS).
Given below is the list of winners from FICS 2020 other than the 2 already listed above. The table shows the project name, abstract, Team Lead name and the affiliated College/School from NUST:
| Anxiety Relief | A portable and effective combined hardware & software solution that tracks breathing records and generates vibrotactile patterns accordingly that pace breathing automatically to reduce anxiety. | Mariam Jafri | CEME |
| Eco Bitumen | The project addresses the issue of waste management and infrastructure development by manufacturing eco-bitumen for road construction by the pyrolysis of solid plastic waste. | Talha Naveed | SCME |
| Clen-Air | Idea is to design and fabricate an indoor air filter for VOCs. It would be made using activated carbon produced from the pyrolysis of rice straw which can be used in educational institutes & offices. | Dania Khan | SCEE |
| Solar Clean | With 2.5 billion people across the world without access to basic sanitation, Solar Clean provides essential sustainable sterilization for tools & surgical equipment for hospital, businesses & home | Rimsha Rehan | S3H |
| X-Free | The primary aim of this project is to reduce accidents faced by pedestrians wearing headphones, by designing an application which alerts the user via his/her earphones in case of emergency. | Muhammad Ali | SEECS |
It is worth noting that the last 3 projects were awarded special prizes.
Winners of the competition were also recognized by the industry and offered jobs at renowned firms. The projects were not only inspected by renowned academia officials but also by top-ranking officials from the industry. More information regarding the competition can be viewed on their main page: https://fics.nust.edu.pk/
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