Two undergraduate student teams of the Department of Computer and Information Science won the first and second prizes in the “IEEE Project Competition 2012” held at the University of Macau on 20th May 2012.

The first team, Lei I Kei (Wendy) and Wong Wong (Jacky) won a First Prize with their project “iINTERACT - Study of Eye Tracking Technologies and Its Applications”. The second team, Lei Sio Meng (Vincent), Tang Kam Wa (Roy) and Ng Ka Long (Ronald) won a Second Prize with their project “CanSpeak – Cantonese Text to Speech System”. Both teams are supervised by Dr. Derek F. Wong and Dr. Lidia S. Chao.

iINTERACT, a video-based Eye-tracking system that monitors and captures the details of the fast movement of subject’s pupil. The system employs an inexpensive solution by using convention digital video camera to keep track of eye’s movement and control for human-computer interaction. It allows users to play computer games, input text and draw pictures with eye control instead of keyboard and mouse. In addition, the gaze motion can be analyzed and displayed in form of gaze plot and heat map.

CanSpeak is a Cantonese Text to Speech application over Web environment. The system accepts Traditional Chinese text input and produces corresponding Cantonese pronunciations. User can easily rewind and listen to the synthesized voices.

The IEEE Project Competition 2012 has the goal of encouraging excellence in Information Technology, Electro-mechanic, Electronic & Electrical and E-Commerce projects. It was organized by the University of Macau Student Branch of the IEEE Macau Chapter. This year’s competition attracted 14 projects, including 3 from Hong Kong and 11 from Macau.