Wednesday August 19, 2015
Students received cash prizes as well as merchandise from participating industries.
Kuala Lumpur: A total of 35 teams of university engineering and computer science students presented their inventions and innovations at the grand finale of the Innovate Malaysia Design Conference (IMDC) 2015 held at Connexion@Nexus, Bangsar South.
The teams were shortlisted from a total of 250 team entries that came from tertiary education institutions such as UiTM, UPM, UTM, USM, KDU, Swinburne, and various other public and private institutions. Winners were chosen from seven different industry categories after presenting their innovations earier to the judging panel.
Also present at the event was Minister in the Prime Minister’s department Datuk Seri Abdul Wahid Omar, Talent Corporation Malaysia Berhad CEO Johan Mahmood Merican, and UiTM vice-chancellor Tan Sri Datuk Seri Sahol Hamid Abu Bakar.
The IMDC is a multi-discipline engineering design competition which aims to promote an innovative culture among engineering graduates and foster closer industry-academia collaboration between leading employers and future graduates.
The conference and competition which has been held annually since 2010, is supported by the Ministry of Higher Education, TalentCorp, Multimedia Development Corporation (MDeC), Malaysian Technical Universities (MTUN) and managed by Dream Catcher Consulting Sdn. Bhd.
“IMDC plays an important role to attract and nurture our young budding engineers for a career in research and development,” said Wahid.
He added that the industry and academia collaboration is especially important to optimise Malaysia’s talent pool in view of the nation’s Economic Transformation Programme.
The two-day event, which was officiated on Monday by Deputy Minister of higher education Datuk May Yap Kain Ching, also saw a technical symposium and an industry showcase take place on the day of the launch.
This year’s IMDC was chaired by University Teknologi Mara, and was organised by industry leaders such as Altera, Intel, Keysight, MathWorks, Microsoft, National Instruments, and SilTerra, and in partnership with Dream Catcher . National Instruments was also the industry host for the grand finale this year.
The event closed with a prize-giving ceremony in which the Award for Excellence was awarded to Lim Huey Woan from UTM for her project entitled Throb Arrhythmia Screener System-on-Chip (SOC)-based Arrhythmia Screener followed by the launch of IMDC 2016 competition which will be hosted by MathWorks.