By Michelle Mills
With aspirations of being headhunted by Microsoft in China and Silicon Valley, three IT students have taken a step closer to making their dreams a reality.
PhD students Andrew Tan, David Wang and Chien-Jon Soon impressed judges in a national inventors’ competition by designing an IT system that allows students to receive lectures via their mobile phones or PDAs.
Their invention placed them third in the national Imagine Cup which is run by Microsoft and attracts university teams from across Australia.
The Brisbane trio have developed a system dubbed Question and Answer Technology (QAT) for a virtual learning environment that could potentially see students listening to lectures from home, on the train or even at the pub.
“We realised that a lot of students are not attending lectures... we wanted to enable this group of students to listen to what was said in the lecture theatre and also ask questions,” Andrew said.
QAT allows lecture notes to be downloaded onto a phone or PDA (personal digital assistant) for offline usage, with the student able to pause the information and ask questions by speaking into their device.
The students are working with the Information Technology faculty and hope to run a trial at QUT in first semester, 2008.
“Potentially we would like to move it to ipods. We hope to implement it in several universities,” Chien-Jon said.
Currently the students are working on diverse research projects and are based at a joint QUT and Microsoft eResearch centre in the Brisbane CBD.
David focuses on audio wikis, Chien-Jon uses technology for geography and mapping, while Andrew is concentrating on 3D graphics.
Andrew, Chien-Jon and David are an example of cross-cultural collaboration coming together at QUT, originally coming from Singapore, Malaysia and China respectively.
With their first joint invention under their belt, a stimulating research environment and strong industry links, no doubt they can look forward to exciting global careers working with the giants of technology research.
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