The COMSATS Institute of Information Technology's Electrical Engineering students have won the Graphical System Design (GSD) MUSABAQA 2015 Competition held in Lebanon, on May 15. A team of five undergraduate students of the Lahore campus won the first prize in this project competition. A spokesman said the competition was held under the patronage of the National Instruments, Technology Company - the technology leaders in platforms for Academia and Research.
The National Instrument's annual academic day held in Beirut, Lebanon, holds a student design competition named GSD MUSABAKA. Entries for this competition sent from all over the Middle East, Gulf Countries and North Africa. The team comprising Faran Maqsood, Usama Shahid, Maida Farooq, Sanan Ahmed and Usman Shahid were among the top three projects selected as the finalists and were given the opportunity to come and present their project in front of delegates from over 25 countries at the International Conference 2015.
The final year undergraduate project "Semi-autonomous Wheelchair with Multi Mode Controls Using NI myRIO" has been a cost effective project designed to address various disabilities by incorporating various control modes. The control modes include joystick, eye blinking, mobile phone, voice control and Kinect sensor based skeletal tracking mode. The winning project was awarded a cash prize of $2,000 plus an automatic qualification for the world design competition which will be held in the US, where five finalists from different regions from all over the world will compete for the top prize. The project was supervised by Assistant Professor Doctor Mujtaba Jaffery, with Electrical Engineering Department Head Dr Sobia Baig extending her support to the winning team.
The delegates from many countries praised the efforts and the quality of engineering students in Pakistan. Jubilant about his students' win, Project Supervisor Dr Jaffery said, "I am very pleased and proud of my students' accomplishment. I am hopeful that other students will take their work and follow their lead towards other milestones of excellence."