Splash Awards 2018
School of Information Technology

NYP clinches champion and 1st runner-up positions in this year’s Splash Awards 2018!

The Splash Award 2018 final was held on 7 July at the Lifelong Learning Institute with Team Mimibot and Team YAT emerging champions and 1st runner-up respectively. Congratulations to both teams who won with their innovative ideas and stunning presentation!

The theme for this year’s Splash Awards was related to Artificial Intelligence built into a home-based, emotionally expressive robot called Xiaobai. The task for participating teams was to develop the most innovative, commercial solution that makes use of its Speech Recognition, Text-to-Speech, and Natural Language Understanding capabilities. Of the 8 shortlisted finalists, five were from Nanyang Polytechnic.

Our champion team, Mimibot, from the School of Information Technology, was made up of students Bryan Lee Wei Han and Justin Soh Jun Hao from the Diploma in Cybersecurity and Digital Forensics. They positioned Xiaobai as a home-based robot that engages children through fun activities such as games and music. Additionally, it is capable of accessing their emotional state through analysing the child’s facial expressions and conversations with the robot. By using semantic analysis on the conversations with the child, the robot can produce analytical charts to allow busy working parents to gain insights into child’s emotions.

Our first runner-up, Team YAT, also from the School of Information Technology, was made up of students Tan Jun Ming, Ryan Warwick Han, and Tan Hong Meng from the Diploma in Infocomm and Security. Together, they proposed deploying Xiaobai to schools and counselling centres to engage students and young people like a human counsellor. With its Natural Language Understanding capabilities, their solution can conduct casual conversations and detect stress levels in students. When it detects any unhealthy mental state, it will alert their parents or educators to follow up.

Once again, kudos to our two winning teams for standing out amongst the 8 finalists and winning over the judges!