SINGAPORE, 24 OCTOBER 2008 – The National University of Singapore has defeated teams from China, Japan and the US to win the Star Challenge@Fusionopolis, clinching the US$100,000 top prize.
Fifty six teams from 17 countries entered this global competition which began 10 months ago. The contestants included search engine enthusiasts plus several of the world’s top laboratories.
The competition was held at the competition’s sponsor and organizer, Singapore’s Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), which fosters world-class scientific research and talent.
According to the organizer, the other finalist teams included SHRC from Peking University, China; the Laboratoire d'Informatique de Grenoble in France; NII-KAORI/IRISA in Japan; and Team UIUC-YX, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, USA.
All five finalists had survived three increasingly difficult challenges that preceded the Grand Finals, and converged on Singapore for the competition, said the scientific agency.
Journey through a secret island
At the Grand Finals, the finalist teams engaged in a close-fought battle that took them through a secret island in ‘Second Life’.
“They had to overcome virtual obstacles to win clues that would help them solve the ubiquitous problem of multimedia search,” said an agency representative. “Using new technologies and algorithms that they had created for the competition, the teams performed voice and video search tasks on a multilingual database in English, Mandarin, Malay and Tamil.”
The teams had to perform this challenging task in less than two hours.
Said Victor Goh from Team NUS: “We are absolutely elated to win and would like to thank Prof Chua Tat Seng and our supporter. We were honoured to be up against so many worthy contestants. The next generation multimedia retrieval technology is on its way.”
All contestants own the Intellectual Property to their technologies, said an agency representative.
