NUS Computing Year 4 undergraduate Lin Tingjin Jovian has walked away with a cash prize of S$2,000 for the work that he has done in his Final Year Project (FYP).

He is the very first winner of NUS School of Computing’s FYP-Innovation Award, and his top-spot project FYP is entitled “Human Computation through Game Playing”.

Jovian’s FYP works on the recognition that through online games, people can collectively solve large-scale computational problems. He created Typography, a Facebook application, to help digitize newspaper articles that fail to meet the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) requirements set by National Library Board (NLB).

 
The new Facebook app will bring people together for leisure proposes, while at the same time, treat human players as intelligent and dynamic processors in a distributed system where each player performs a small part of a massive computation.

FYP-Innovation Award has been set up to encourage students to turn their innovative, practical and commercialisable ideas into real world applications with substantial impact.

The second call for FYP-Innovation Award closed on 31 December 2009. Eight projects were submitted for consideration.