KUALA LUMPUR, 23 May — Team H2O from the School of Electrical Engineering, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM) has emerged winner of the Hack for Good 2.0: Connected Mangroves competition and seized prize worth RM10,000.
The team, consists of four students from Bachelor of Engineering (Electrical-Mechatronics) program, Foong Siew Wei, Lee Pin Loon, Looi Kian Seong and Por Yu Kheng, stole the judges’ hearts with their project, Hydro Health On-Demand.
The project was about the real-time monitoring system deploying NB- Internet of Things (IoT) technology to measure temperature, pH, turbidity, dissolved oxygen and heavy metal across various geographical areas where correlations between the data with its topology, community boundaries and data population.
The hackathon was a joint initiative between UTM, Universiti Putra Malaysia (UPM), Ericsson Malaysia, Malaysian Communication and Multimedia Commission (MCMC), Celcom Axiata,XPAND and Higher Education Department (JPT) under the Academia-Industry Talent Exchange Program (CEO@Faculty 2.0)
UTM team manager, Assoc. Prof. Ir. Dr. Ahmad Athif Mohd. Faudzi said the projects were evaluated based on originality, novelty and wow factor, usefulness and practicality, execution and quality of the prototype, business potential and Ericsson technology and API adoption.
“Four professional judges from Ericsson, Axiata XPAND, MCMC and BASF Petronas evaluated the projects to select the winners,” said Dr. Ahmad Athif.
Dr. Ahmad Athif also said that IoT is a new technology in Malaysia and to have this new technology at the Innovation Centre for 5G (IC5G), UTM KL campus is such an honour.
For the past six weeks, the participants worked hard to come up with their prototypes and finally, the demonstration session has come for the participants to demonstrate their final product using this NB-IoT network.
The hackathon competition has witnessed enthusiastic participation from students of different colleges and institutes across Malaysia.
“Interestingly, one of the teams comprised school students aged as young as 15 years old. Participating teams could choose from four themes – ‘IoT in Water Quality Management’, ‘IoT in Fisheries Production’, ‘IoT in Mangrove Ecology and Diversity’ and ‘IoT in Climate Change’’.
“The hackathon was conceptualized to attract and stimulate innovations in the IoT space to support the Mangrove ecosystem as well as create local use cases to accelerate cellular IoT adoption by university and industries,” he said.
The hackathon was open to university and tertiary education students from all private and public institutions in Malaysia as well as professional developers, programmers, designers, and engineers. Over 40 entries were received for this competition across both students and professionals category of entries.
The top 14 ideas were shortlisted and a Pre-Hack Workshop was carried out to prepare the participants with the necessary skills for the prototype development.
During the hacking period, periodic progress meetings with industry mentors were carried out and the participants were given a chance to go to Sabak Bernam and experience Mangroves planting and identify problems to be solved.
Besides H20, another team consists of UTM students & alumni won consolation prize worth RM 3000. They were Muhammad Zulhelmi Bin Kamarudin and Mohd Ridzuan Bin Johary, both from Mechabotic and UTM alumni teamed with two Bachelor of Computer Science (Data Engineering) 2u2i students; Aiman Syahmi Bin Amat Salihen and Lim Wei Wen from the School of Computing.
