15TH WAITTA AWARDS

15TH WAITTA AWARDS 2005-2006

At a glittering awards ceremony on the 24th of March 2006 in the Grand Ballroom of the Burswood Resort Hotel, Simon Netwon of the School of Computer Science & Software Engineering (CSSE), UWA walked away as deserving winner in the Student Project Category of the 15th WA Information Technology & Telecommunications Awards (WAITTA 2005). This continues the long tradition of success of the undergraduates and honours students of CSSE at these awards, as can be seen in the table below.

The strength of the programs and graduates at CSSE is underscored by the fact that another UWA student, Paul Goh was shortlisted as a finalist for the award. Thus 50% of the shortlisted finalists came from CSSE, UWA. ECU & Curtin each had one shortlisted finalist.

The Student Project award recognises a student project, up to and including undergraduate or honours level, undertaken at a WA tertiary education institution during the year, with emphasis is placed on practical IT&T applications.

Simon's winning project (supervised by Dr Chris McDonald), Art-Net - Control of Professional Lighting Systems over IP focused on developing software for the control of professional lighting systems over IP.

The ArtNet protocol allows lighting equipment found in entertainment venues to be controlled using existing computer networks rather than specialised cabling. By combining the software created for this project and a wireless router, a device was developed that enables users to control lighting without the need for wires at a fraction of the cost of commercial systems.

Paul's submission (supervised by Dr Eunjung Holden), Automatic Recognition of Auslan Fingerspelling using Hidden Markov Models was undertaken as part of his Honour project for the Bachelor of Computer and Mathematical Science.

The Auslan Finger-spelling Recogniser (AFR) Sytem is capable of recognizing a vocabulary of 20 finger-spelling words and names in real-time, with an accuracy of 97.15% at the letter level and 88.61% at the word level

It was certainly a night of passionate statements by award recipients and by the many sponsors of the event. One could feel the great sense of importance of the IT industry to the WA & Australian economies, and the fact that IT success stories had not traditionally been given the limelight it deserved. Dr Nick Spadaccini, Head of School for the School of Computer Science & Software Engineering was called upon to present the Achiever of the Year Award, and he challenged members of the industry who benefit greatly from the quality of students produced to give something back to education and provide support for events that recognize high achievers in the IT industry such as the WAITTA awards.