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National University of Science and Technology (NUST) is one of the most prestigious institutes of Pakistan. Their School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (SEECS) has produced some of the most popular startups in Pakistan including Cricflex and Codistan. SEECS offers three bachelor programs:
- Bachelors in Electrical Engineering
- Bachelors in Software Engineering
- Bachelors in Computer Science
On Thursday, 2nd May 2019, SEECS organized Open House 2019, an event where industry experts from all around Pakistan evaluate Final Year Projects made by 4th-year students of SEECS. While scoring, judges look for several things like how big of a problem is being tackled and how is the problem being addressed. The idea of the event is to promote students to develop industrial grade solutions. There were four award categories at the Open House:
- Best Electrical Engineering project
- Best Computer Science Project
- Best Software Engineering Project
- Best Project from the Department of Computing
Best Electrical Engineering Projects
*Rohan Manzoor (left) (Disclosure: Rohan is also a writer at TechJuice) and Hamas Khan (right) with project enRing
- enRing is a smart ring that enables single-handed interactions with AR/VR headsets, mobile phones, tablets and PCs resulting in a more convenient and fatigue-free experience. It’s more like the Minecraft of input methods, you can interact with every app on every device as you please. For example with just a tap, you can change TV channels without a remote, swap brushes in photoshop, answer calls without touching your smartwatch, edit videos on tablets with precision and much more.
- Intelligent Geyser automates the conventional gas based water geysers by making it fully automated. So now you don’t need to wait for the geyser heat up the water, by the time you want it, it’ll be ready. You can customize the timings to your liking to get the hot water exactly when you need. The best thing is that all of this can be done on your phone.
- Real-time autofocusing of a thermal infrared camera was done using an efficient algorithm for cameras having only a manual focus option. Working with such cameras is tedious and time-consuming but the algorithm provides fast results and accurate focus.
Best Computer Science Projects
*Khuzaima Jamil (left), Mussawer Raza (center) and Samar Hassan (right) with project Emotion Identification and text analysis on call center audio
- Emotion Identification and text analysis on call center audio offers an add-on to the already existing call center systems. State of the art machine learning techniques and analytical tools were used to identify why the customer is unhappy and potentially prevent the business from losing those customers.
- Urdu writing recognition: In Pakistan, we still have old writings and documents which have not been digitized. In order to preserve those documents, an automated system was developed. The process is simple, upload the image on the website and then you get the digitized version. So those who used to write on paper will now be able to digitize their work fairly easily.
- Kitchen Connect: The idea is to give home chefs a source of earning and people a platform to have healthy homemade food delivered to their doorstep.
Best Software Engineering Projects
*Muntasir Ali Agha (left), Afzaal Ahmad (behind), Sir.Majid Maqbool (center) and Samar Hassan (right) with project VOIX
- VOIX is the first of its kind of Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) device which incorporates Machine Learning models to help children suffering from Autism Spectrum Disorder better communicate in everyday scenarios, and provides unintentional learning to the child.
- SUMM-IT-UP: In today’s day and age, information is in excess and time is limited. SUMM-IT-UP is a web application that generates accurate, coherent and concise extractive summaries of single/multiple documents, without restrictions of domain specificity, on the basis of concept extraction using an ensemble of Natural Language Processing techniques.
- eDonate is an online donations portal that connects potential donors to charity organizations. It bridges the prevalent communication gap between the two parties and makes the overall donations process more streamlined and efficient. This enables more people to participate in donating and allows charities to receive more donation items that they require.
Best Project from the Department of Computing
As the computer science and software engineering programs are quite similar fields, an overall best project is chosen from the two programs. There were no runner ups in for this award.
*Rafay Mehfooz (left), Haseeb Awan (center), Ayesha Tahir (center) and Ali Azhar (Right) with project Lynx
- Lynx is a backbone network planning tool, allowing network engineers to restructure and discover best network possibilities by modeling optical networks in simulation without any additional budget and time costs. Lynx utilizes state-of-the-art algorithms, cutting-edge technologies, and user-friendly experience to provide high-level optical network insights that help network operators to reduce business and networks costs.
