Team NUS-SoC Wins US$100,000 at International Search Engine Competition

A team that includes two recent multimedia graduates from NUS School of Computing has trumped their rivals from China, Japan, France and the United States to win the Grand Finals of The Star Challenge@Fusionopolis.

For their effort, Victor Goh Hai Kiat and Neo Shi Yong, along with their team-mate Li Haojie, walked away with the prize money of US$100,000. Shiyong and Victor pursued their graduate studies in Computer Science with SoC, with Shiyong obtaining his PhD in 2008, and Victor his MSc in 2007.

Haojie, the third man on the team, is their fellow research for the Lab of Media Search at NUS. The finals of the competition were held on 23 Oct 2008.
 

Competing in the digital world of “Second Life”, the team had to overcome virtual obstacles to win clues that would help them solve the ubiquitous problem of multimedia search.

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 solutions are novel in that today’s traditional existing search engines are text-based and, as such, can locate only multimedia material that has been tagged in text.

As tagging is laborious, it is not routinely done, and the tagging that does occur is generally not of high quality and consistent.

Asked about their winning feat, Victor had this to say: “We are absolutely elated to win the Star Challenge! We would like to thank Prof Chua Tat Seng and all who have supported us….We are pleased with the end results as well as honoured to be up against so many worthy contestants. The next generation multimedia retrieval technology is on its way out!"