GIST Undergraduate Student Wins Grand Prize at 'NET Challenge Camp 2020'

[Asia Economy Honam Reporting Headquarters Reporter Lee Gwan-woo] The Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology (GIST) announced on the 24th that six undergraduate students majoring in Electrical, Electronics, and Computer Engineering participated in the ‘NET Challenge Camp 2020’ and won the Minister of Science and ICT Award, the grand prize in the student team category of the Challenge League.

This competition is an event supporting the development and commercialization of innovative ideas in the network application field, hosted by the Ministry of Science and ICT and organized by the National Information Society Agency and the KOREN (KOrea advanced REsearch Network) Research Cooperation Forum.

The award ceremony was held online to prevent the spread of COVID-19.

The ‘NET Challenge Camp 2020’ was held by calling for ideas related to ICT new technologies and services applicable to commercialization in the network application field last May, selecting 15 student teams and 4 corporate teams, and evaluating the idea implementation process and results over about five months.

Lee Chang-ha (team leader), Kim Tae-wan, and Park Jong-hoon, who are fourth-year students in the Department of Electrical, Electronics, and Computer Engineering at GIST, and Kim Jung-yoon, Jeon Su-a, and Choi Yoo-ra, who are third-year students, formed the team ‘Moyeobwayo Gureumgyosil’ and participated in the competition under the guidance of Professor Kim Jong-won from the AI Graduate School.

The members of the ‘Moyeobwayo Gureumgyosil’ team heard about the ‘NET Challenge Camp’ from GIST students who had participated in last year’s competition and conceived their idea while taking Professor Kim Jong-won’s ‘Theory and Experiment of Computer Systems’ course offered in the first semester of this year.

Afterwards, they concretized their idea under the guidance of Professor Kim’s Network Computing Systems Laboratory.

The ‘Moyeobwayo Gureumgyosil’ team implemented an ‘avatar-based online classroom platform supporting immersive non-face-to-face interaction’ using clouding computing technology via the KOREN network. Their idea’s most distinctive feature is that it eliminates the need for direct webcam use, preventing privacy invasion, while allowing teachers to understand students’ status through avatars, enabling active interaction between teachers and students.

In this platform, the student’s webcam video is analyzed by a computer vision artificial intelligence (AI) model and sent to the server, which synchronizes information among users and constructs a virtual classroom. The client displays the GUI (graphical user interface) format visible to both students and teachers, leveraging the advantages of online environments while facilitating interaction similar to offline classes.

Lee Chang-ha, the team leader of ‘Moyeobwayo Gureumgyosil,’ said, “We proposed a solution to many problems found in online lecture platforms, such as ‘privacy invasion issues’ and ‘difficulty in grasping the flow of classes.’” He added, “This solution will become a new standard for online non-face-to-face lectures not only in the current COVID-19 era but also in the post-COVID era.”

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.