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Congratulation to Muhammad Fahreza Alghifari (KOE) and Muhammad Wildan Zulfikar (KICT) for being 1st runner up in recent prestigious competition, the Innovate Malaysia Design Competition 2018 (IMDC 2018): Google Track, the largest design competition in Malaysia. The competition was organized by Dreamcather which gathered world-renowned companies such as Google, Intel, Keysight, MathWorks, Microsoft, SAS, SilTerra, and SOLIDWORKS to provide technological challenges as well as companies such as Celcom, Cyberview, Daikin, Exabytes, Telekom Malaysia and WCS Malaysia offered design challenges.

The IMDC2018: Grand Finals which was held on the 9th of July 2018 at MagiC Cyberjaya.  From more than 900 contestants, both Fahreza and Wildan were being shortlisted among 39 finalists. Their promising project was known as “Application of Speech Emotion Recognition using Google Tensorflow Deep Neural Network for Suicide Prevention Hotlines” (EMOS) and it has been supervised by Prof. Dr. Teddy Surya Gunawan from KOE. The same project was also being awarded “Best Project of the Region” (with a status of Excellent Award).

EMOS is a very stunning project since the invented machine can understand the human’s emotions by communicating to it. Their EMOS system boosted an accuracy of 91% for 3 emotions (happy, angry, and sad) and 80% for 5 emotions (happy, angry, sad, neutral, fear), while free from language barriers. The concept was further developed into a communication platform dedicated for suicide prevention hotlines. During the competition, they highlighted a business model which allows them to funnel the profit they get from commercializing the EMOS system for Befrienders Malaysia, so Befrienders Malaysia can use their system for free. The team’s achievement marks an achievement for IIUM, as this is the first finalist placement since the beginning of IMDC in 2011. The team hopes that more teams from IIUM will participate and compete in the upcoming years.

The team would also like send their regards, as their success is due to many parties, such as guidance from Prof. Dr. Teddy Surya Gunawan, advice and logistic support from Counseling and Career Services Centre, as well support from all the IIUM community members during the video competition, where success was measured by the community feedback.