Student Achievements 2023
Here are some of the accolades garnered by our students and alumni:
National third place in Sustainability track for HackSingapore 2023: Cookie Clickers
Team Cookie Clickers, made up of CSD, ESD and Freshmore students, won third place in the Sustainability track for national hackathon HackSingapore 2023 among 44 submitted projects. The team developed a mobile phone application that uses an interactive radar chart to present various sustainability metrics that are affecting a particular website, then providing practical and actionable suggestions to website owners and businesses to improve upon.
HackSingapore is a month-long annual national hackathon event that highlights the skills and innovation of Singapore’s tech community. This year, HackSingapore addresses global challenges in three areas: financial inclusion, sustainability and digital empowerment. Throughout the month, the AngelHack Team and its partners provided participants with access to mentorship and various workshops. The grand finale where all hackathon winners were announced was part of Asia’s flagship tech event, Asia Tech x Singapore this year.
Team Cookie Clickers comprises:
- Andrea Cheah Shiue Er (CSD)
- Fung Jing Wen Elisabeth (CSD)
- Parth Kumar (CSD)
- Mithunbalaji MG (Freshmore)
- Reina Peh Shu Ting (ESD)
PREMIA Best Student Paper Award 2023
The Pattern Recognition and Machine Intelligence Association (PREMIA) invites student submissions for the PREMIA Best Student Paper Awards annually.
Information Systems Technology and Design (ISTD) PhD student, Qu Haoxuan, received the Certificate of Merit for the paper ‘Heatmap Distribution Matching for Human Pose Estimation’ (https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2210.00740) which was accepted at the 36th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2022).
Authors of the paper include, Xu Li (ISTD PhD student), Yujun Cai, Foo Lin Geng (ISTD PhD student & ESD alumni, class of 2019), with Assistant Professor Liu Jun as corresponding author.
National runner-up of the James Dyson Award: Project Mimir
A team of Engineering Product Development (EPD) students have won the national runner-up prize for the James Dyson Award. Their design, Project Mimir, was selected among 48 entries entered into the Singapore edition of the Award.
To address the lack of affordable and accessible Braille printing options, the team repurposed 3D printer parts to build the Mimir embosser at a fraction of the cost of Braille embossers in the market today. Its software comes with built-in voice-to-text capability, and users can also connect via a computer to input text, or even translate from various file formats. With this, Project Mimir empowers visually impaired individuals to produce Braille materials independently. The team is working to further develop and commercialise Project Mimir with the hopes of lowering costs further.
“Designing for them is one thing, but designing with them should be the main objective for anyone doing so for a community they’re not a part of”, said Sarah Loo. The team worked with the Singapore Association of the Visually Handicapped to gather feedback, involving the community at every step of the design process.
The design was originally presented by the team for their EPD pillar module - 30.007 Engineering Design Innovation, where they won the ‘Best Prototype’ award.
Project Mimir team comprises:
- Kushagra Jain (EPD Senior)
- Michael Lim Kee Hian (EPD Senior, STEP student)
- Loo Jia Ying Sarah (EPD Senior)
- Shamoeel Aliasgar Moochhala (EPD Senior)
- Colin Teoh (EPD Senior)
In the news:
Southeast Asia Tchoukball Championships
Yeo Sze Yin, Engineering Product Development (EPD) Junior, and the women’s Tchoukball national team clinched Gold at the recent Southeast Asia Tchoukball Championships held in Singapore from 17 to 18 July 2023. Sze Yin is also VP of the SUTD Tchoukball Club.
WFDF 2023 World Under-24 Ultimate Championships
Engineering Product Development (EPD) senior, Claire Tham, was part of Singapore’s Mixed Team that won a historic Silver medal in the World Flying Disc Federation (WFDF) 2023 World Under-24 Ultimate Championships held in Nottingham, United Kingdom, from 2 to 8 July.
The WFDF is the international sports federation responsible for world governance of flying disc (frisbee) sports, including Ultimate, Beach Ultimate, Disc Golf, Freestyle, Guts, and Individual Events. Teams from more than 20 nations participated at the 2023 championships.
Claire will also be representing SUTD in the upcoming Singapore University Games.
Global Essay Competition 2023 at the 52nd St. Gallen Symposium
Current SUTD Architecture and Sustainable Design (ASD) PhD student and alumna of the Master of Engineering - Innovation by Design programme (Class of 2021), Doreen Steven Mlote, was selected as one of the top 100 authors in the Global Essay Competition 2023. The competition is part of the 52nd St. Gallen Symposium which was held from 3 May to 5 May 2023 in Switzerland.
Doreen’s essay, titled ‘Built to Last or Built to Reuse – Creating a Sustainable Legacy Through the Necessary Transition from Designing for Building’s Durability to Designing for Disassembly and Adaptability’, describes a way that the building industry can contribute towards sustainability and environmental protection, and the necessary transition required for a net-zero promising future. Design for Disassembly and Adaptability is presented in the essay as a promising way to achieve a closed-loop material flow system for sustainable construction processes.
Conversations with representatives from Youth Achievement Awards.
As one of the top authors, Doreen was invited on a sponsored trip to participate at the Symposium with fellow Leaders of Tomorrow who represent the younger generation and are change makers in their respective fields.
The St. Gallen Symposium is a global platform for cross-generational dialogue and collaboration, which brings together leaders of today and tomorrow from business, politics, science and civil society to foster mutual understanding and joint action on the world’s most pressing issues and challenges.
Six SUTD Faculty, Alumni and Student in Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia Class of 2023
Six SUTD faculty, alumni and student join the 300 outstanding young trailblazers of Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia Class of 2023. They are:
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Assistant Professor Xiong Zehui from SUTD’s Information Systems Technology and Design (ISTD) Pillar;
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Engineering Product Development (EPD) alumni Eleora Teo Jia Yee (Class of 2019) and Johannes Brian Sunarko (Class of 2021);
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Computer Science and Design* (CSD) alumni Aravind Kandiah and Charles Wong (both Class of 2019); and
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EPD PhD student Denzel Lee.
Assistant Professor Xiong Zehui is recognised for his research in AI.
Under the category of Healthcare & Science, Assistant Prof Xiong is recognised for his research in Artificial Intelligence (AI), data science and wireless technology; while Eleora (Jia Yee) and Johannes, together with their co-founder Abel Teo, are featured for their med-tech startup Castomize.
Johannes (centre) and Eleora (right) are featured for their startup Castomize along with co-founder Abel Teo (left). (Image credit: forbes.com)
Co-founders Aravind and Charles are honoured under the category of Enterprise Technology for the achievements of their startup Bifrost AI in fields of generative AI and synthetic data.
Denzel Lee (left) with his co-founder Keechin Goh from Datature. (Image credit: Denzel Lee)
Also selected in the category of Enterprise Technology are Denzel Lee and his co-founder Keechin Goh, whose company Datature helps professionals without coding skills to build machine learning applications.
The Class of 2023 honourees were vetted and selected from over 4,000 candidates by the Forbes Asia team and a panel of independent, expert judges. In its eighth year, the 2023 list features a diverse set of young entrepreneurs and leaders who are championing innovations within their respective fields, with 20 countries and territories represented across the Asia-Pacific region.
* SUTD’s Computer Science and Design (CSD) degree programme was previously named Information Systems Technology and Design (ISTD) prior to 2020.
SUTD Athletes Win at 2023 SEA Games
Image credits: Team Singapore
Four SUTD alumni and students were part of Team Singapore at the 2023 Southeast Asian (SEA) Games held in Phnom Penh, Cambodia from 5 to 17 May.
Jezamine Chua, Master of Architecture (M.Arch) alumna from Class of 2017, won the Bronze medal in Wrestling Women’s Freestyle Under 76kg. (Watch: Highlights of the match and interview)
Heather Lee Xuan Hui, Engineering Systems and Design (ESD) alumna from Class of 2022, was part of the women’s Water Polo team that took home the Silver medal. (Watch: Highlights of the water polo team’s win)
Foo Wenxin, ESD Junior, was part of the women’s Floorball team which emerged champions. (Read: Floorball: Singapore sweep aside Thailand to take third SEA Games women’s title)
Ong Jung Yi, current Freshmore student, won the Gold medal in Men’s Swimming 200m Butterfly. This is also his first Gold at the Games. (Watch: Singapore's Ong Jung Yi finally captures his 1st-ever 200m fly gold medal)
Silver and Best Green Innovation Awards at AYDA Awards
With her project ‘Living Building - A Hybrid Approach to Future Architecture’, Master of Architecture alumna (Class of 2022) Grace Teo Yu Cheng has won the Silver and Best Green Innovation awards in the Architecture category of the Nippon Paint AYDA Awards 2022.
In light of the climate crisis, Grace explores the integral use of plants complemented by artificial materials, in modular living systems for buildings to achieve a lower carbon footprint and reduce emissions. With plants playing a significant role in buildings, experience of spaces within is also altered with the potential to influence a low carbon lifestyle.
Inspired by her love for the outdoors and exploring nature trails, Grace hopes to bring such new spatial experiences into architecture through her designs.
The AYDA Awards (previously known as Asia Young Designer Awards) was first launched in 2008 as part of Nippon Paint’s vision to nurture the next generation of design talents, serving as a platform to inspire Architectural and Interior Design students to develop their skills through cross-learning and networking opportunities with key industry players and fellow peers in the region.
JCI Ten Outstanding Young Persons (TOYP) of Singapore
SUTD alumna Pek Yun Ning (ESD, Class of 2019) has been awarded the Ten Outstanding Young Persons (TOYP) of Singapore by Junior Chamber International (JCI), in the category of ‘Moral and/or Environmental Leadership’.
Yun Ning is currently Chairman, CEO and Founder of SGP Foods, dedicated to building Singapore’s food and climate resilience through development of proprietary technologies and processes.
JCI is a nonprofit organisation of young individuals committed to creating impact in their communities. The TOYP award recognises and highlights the leadership, contributions and achievements of the recipients in areas such as technological development, human rights and entrepreneurship.