Released on: October 23, 2008, 3:25 am

Press Release Author: A*STAR

Industry: Internet & Online

Press Release Summary: Teams from China, France, Japan, Singapore and USA compete in
Grand Finals of this first-of-its-kind global competition to encourage the
development of next-generation multimedia search engine technologies

Press Release Body: Singapore, 23 October 2008 - Team NUS from the National
University of Singapore clinched the top prize of US$100,000 at the Grand Finals of
The Star Challenge@Fusionopolis today, the competition's sponsor and organizer,
Singapore's Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) announced.

The other finalist teams were: SHRC from Peking University, China; the Laboratoire
d'Informatique de Grenoble in France; NII-KAORI/IRISA in Japan; and Team UIUC-YX,
University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, USA.

All five finalist teams had survived three increasingly difficult challenges that
preceded the Grand Finals, and converged on Singapore for the competition.

At the Grand Finals, which occurred during FusionFest - week-long celebration to
mark the opening of Fusionopolis, Singapore's new science and engineering powerhouse
- the finalist teams engaged in a close-fought battle that took them through a
secret island in "Second Life". They had to overcome virtual obstacles to win clues
that would help them solve the ubiquitous problem of multimedia search. Using new
technologies and algorithms that they had created for the competition, the teams
performed voice and video search tasks on a multilingual database in English,
Mandarin, Malay and Tamil.

In under only two hours, the teams had to find segments of speech and identify video
scenes in search tasks structured to resemble the multimedia searches that members
of the public would likely want to conduct at their homes and offices, when an
efficient next-generation multimedia search engine becomes available.

Today's traditional existing search engines are text-based and, as such, can locate
only multimedia material that has been tagged in text. As tagging is laborious, it
is not routinely done, and the tagging that does occur is generally not of high
quality and consistent.

Next-generation multimedia search technologies will transform how the public will
interact with rich-media material. Considering the exponential growth of multimedia
content and the proliferation of user-generated platforms such as YouTube, Facebook
and Flickr, it is a technology waiting to be invented.

Said Victor Goh from Team NUS, "We are absolutely elated to win the Star Challenge!
We would like to thank Prof Chua Tat Seng and all who have supported us....We are
pleased with the end results as well as honoured to be up against so many worthy
contestants. The next generation multimedia retrieval technology is on its way
out!"

Said Charles Zukoski, Ph.D., Chairman of A*STAR's Science and Engineering Research
Council, "My congratulations to Team NUS, and to the four finalist teams that made
their way to Singapore after 10 months of competition! This competition has brought
together highly talented young people from all over the world not only in the spirit
of competition, but also in the spirit of exchange and friendship. I hope that even
as the finalist teams continue to make forays into refining multimedia search, they
will also continue to build on the friendships they have made here today. Who
knows, one day, we may find that some of these young people here have collaborated
together to give us the next multi-media search engine!"

A total of 56 teams from 17 countries entered this global competition when it began
10 months ago. The contestants included search engine enthusiasts as well as several
of the world's top laboratories. All of the contestants own the Intellectual
Property to their technologies.

The Singapore Games Creation Competition (SGCC), which was organised by the Nanyang
Polytechnic (NYP) and supported by the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore
(IDA) and Media Development Authority (MDA), was also held in conjunction with The
Star Challenge@Fusionopolis. The names of the winners of the SGCC 2008, an annual
competition designed to encourage Singapore secondary school students to learn how
to create interactive games and to explore games development and other possible
careers in the infocomm industry, are at the annex.

Said Daniel Tan, Director of NYP's School of Interactive & Digital Media, "This
year, we saw a record number of 448 students taking part in the SGCC, which has
grown from strength to strength these past three years. We are very heartened by
the good response of the secondary school students, and their enthusiastic response
in creating interesting and creative games at this competition. This certainly
augers well for the infocomm and interactive media industry in Singapore. We hope
this competition will continue to draw out the passion and creative talents from
among the youths in secondary schools and help expand their interests from playing
games to creating them, besides encouraging them to consider careers in digital
media design or digital entertainment in future."

Web Site: http://www.a-star.edu.sg

Contact Details: Mr Andrew Yap
Acting Manager, Corporate Communications
A*STAR Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R)
DID: (65) 6419 1143 Fax: (65) 6466 7716
Email: jtyap@i2r.a-star.edu.sg
Ms Cathy Yarbrough
for A*STAR
DID: 858-243-1814, Email: sciencematter@yahoo.com