Two Final Year Projects nominated by HKUST School of Engineering received recognitions at the ASM Technology Award 2021. The project presentation and award ceremony were held on June 30, 2021.

A team of four students from BSc in Data Science and Technology won the Silver Award with their project entitled “WiFi Sensing and Bus Queue Analysis for a Smart Campus”. Supervised by Prof. Gary CHAN of Computer Science and Engineering, the team is comprised of CHENG Hiu-Yan, HO Ting-Fung, LEUNG Sze-Chun, and YU Chun-Hoi. Earlier, their project was also named a winner of the Best Final Year Projects and Best Final Year Project Videos of the 2020-21 academic year by the Department of Computer Science and Engineering.

The project is designed to address the time-consuming and frustrating bus queueing issue at the North and South Gates in HKUST. Using big data mining and analytics techniques, the project estimates the level of crowdedness and queuing time of passengers at both gates, by sensing the signals emitted from users’ devices connected to WiFi in a privacy-preserving and real-time manner. Data collected are then processed to filter noisy or unwanted signals, and classified into different bus lanes according to the signal strength. Ultimately, passengers can view the crowdedness indicator, estimated queuing time, queue lengths, and other statistical data through a website accessible from both PC and mobile devices.

Another team, consisted of five students from BEng in Mechanical Engineering and led by Prof. SUN Qingping, presented their work on “A Novel Cam-Driven Compressive Elastocaloric Refrigeration Device” and received a Project Nomination Award. Team members include AU Chun-Yin, Iris HUI Wing-Yan, LUI Ngai-Long, PEA Ching-Hang, and SIU Yiu-Yan.

Now in its sixth year, the ASM Technology Award is an initiative of the ASM Pacific Technology Limited to promote technological innovation in Hong Kong. It honors the best and brightest engineering students – those who are changing the world for the better – for their accomplishments in technology.

This year, a total of 10 Final Year Projects related to engineering and technology have been nominated by five local universities, namely CityU, CUHK, PolyU, HKUST, and HKU.