Released on: September 22, 2008, 12:13 am

Press Release Author: A*STAR

Industry: Internet & Online

Press Release Summary: Five teams have made it past the Qualifying Race of The Star
Challenge 2008 and will now test their skills at the Grand Finals, the Singapore
Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) announced today. They are now
just one step away from the top prize of US$100,000.

Press Release Body: Media Release: For Immediate Release
Total: 4 pages including this page

Five teams from five countries set to meet in A*STAR’s Star Challenge 2008 Grand
Finals at Fusionopolis, Singapore

Details of the challenge at www.thestarchallenge.sg

Singapore, 22 September 2008 – Five teams have made it past the Qualifying Race of
The Star Challenge 2008 and will now test their skills at the Grand Finals, the
Singapore Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) announced today. They
are now just one step away from the top prize of US$100,000. The Star Challenge
2008 is a global competition intended to spur the development of next-generation
multimedia search technologies.

The five finalists (in alphabetical order) are:

• LIG from Laboratoire d'Informatique de Grenoble, France
• LMS CTS from National University of Singapore
• NII-KAORI from National Institute of Informatics, Japan
• SHRC from China (includes members from Peking University)
• UIUC-YX from University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign (UIUC)

The teams will be flown into Singapore for the Grand Finals, held on 23rd October
2008 at Fusionopolis, during the week-long FusionFest celebrations, where they will
test their wits and abilities to devise the fastest, most accurate algorithms for
searching audio and video content. All in an attempt to bring multimedia search a
step closer to being usable in our daily lives.

“We are very excited to be among the Finalists”, said Professor Thomas Huang from
the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), advisor to the UIUC-YX team,
“We enter competitions/evaluations aiming not to win but to learn. We have learned a
great deal from the three Rounds of evaluation which led to the Final; and we are
proud to have done well in these three Rounds.” He added that competitions such as
A*STAR’s Star Challenge will help narrow the gap between lab algorithms and
real-world tasks.
The LIG team from France expressed similar sentiments, claiming that “this challenge
was an opportunity to go beyond what we were already doing”. Team NII-KAORI from
Japan added: “The ‘search by IPA’ task has been very challenging but we strongly
believe it is the task for the future”. IPA stands for International Phonetic
Alphabet and is a phonetic standard for defining the sounds of spoken language.

SHRC team from Peking University, China said, “We are sure that multimedia search
will be an upcoming trend in the near future. The Star Challenge 2008 competition
will illustrate to the public the importance of the new search technology, and also
help the research agency to make quicker progress in such an inspiring area.”

LMS Team (NUS) from Singapore commented: “End users are currently faced with an
overwhelming amount of multimedia data from many sources, for example, newspapers,
radio, and the Internet. Effective multimedia search will make users more
productive and efficient in handling multimedia data in their day-to-day life. This
demand for multimedia search will only increase as time passes.”

The first-of-its-kind competition stretching over ten months, the Star Challenge
creates the space for 56 teams from 17 countries to compete with one another using
their respective technologies. During the Qualifying Race, held on 1 – 3 Sept,
seven teams had to perform voice and video search tasks on a multilingual database
over a 36-hour period. The tasks included finding segments of speech and identifying
video scenes. These search tasks were structured similarly to everyday problems that
we would like to find solutions to.

The tasks in the Grand Finals promise to be both thrilling for the audience and
highly challenging for the teams. The teams will battle it out on a Second Life
island, specially designed by Nanyang Polytechnic for this event. They will have to
solve puzzles and navigate obstacles within Second Life to obtain search tasks,
which they must then solve on-stage in real-time, in all of two hours.

About Fusionopolis
Fusionopolis is Singapore’s science and technology hub that brings together
scientists, research engineers and technology experts from a variety of science and
engineering disciplines, to find innovative solutions for technological and
lifestyle problems facing society and jumpstart future industries.

Fusionopolis will have more than 1500 researchers from the public labs under the
Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), with a broad spectrum of
capabilities ranging from high performance computing to infocomm research, data
storage, materials research and engineering, microelectronics, and manufacturing
technology. The public labs work alongside corporate labs like those of Vestas,
Thales Technology and Seiko Instruments to accelerate the development of
technologies and new products, and bring them to market.

Fusionopolis is located in close proximity to A*STAR’s biomedical sciences research
institutes at Biopolis, which will open up opportunities for the fusion of
capabilities across diverse scientific domains, thus paving the way for
multi-disciplinary research.

A whole-of-Singapore approach has been taken at Fusionopolis to enable it to
jumpstart future industries. Fusionopolis will also be home to Singapore’s various
industry-development public agencies such as the Media Development Authority, the
Economic Development Board and SPRING Singapore.

For more information on Fusionopolis, please visit www.fusionopolis.a-star.edu.sg



About the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR)
A*STAR is Singapore's lead agency for fostering world-class scientific research and
talent for a vibrant knowledge-based Singapore. A*STAR actively nurtures public
sector research and development in Biomedical Sciences, Physical Sciences and
Engineering, with a particular focus on fields essential to Singapore's
manufacturing industry and new growth industries. It oversees 19 research institutes
and consortia and supports extramural research with the universities, hospital
research centres and other local and international partners. At the heart of this
knowledge intensive work is human capital. Top local and international scientific
talent drive knowledge creation at A*STAR research institutes. The Agency also sends
scholars for undergraduate, graduate and post-doctoral training in the best
universities, a reflection of the high priority A*STAR places on nurturing the next
generation of scientific talent.

A*STAR’s science and engineering research institutes will be headquartered at
Fusionopolis.

For more information about A*STAR, please visit www.a-star.edu.sg


Web Site: http://www.a-star.edu.sg/a_star/189-Press-Release?iid=566

Contact Details: For media enquiries, please contact:-
In Singapore: 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


In the US: Ms Cathy Yarbrough
for A*STAR
DID: 858-243-1814, Email: sciencematter@yahoo.com