Tech Triumph: MIT students bag Huawei Prize!

On 7 December 2024, Huawei Hong Kong hosted the “Huawei ICT Competition 2024/25 Hong Kong Award Ceremony” at Cyberport. Approximately 200 attendees were present, including government representatives, organisations, ICT industry leaders, and student representatives from thirteen universities in Hong Kong. Three students from the Department of Mathematics and Information Technology (MIT) advanced to the final phase of the competition and was awarded the Potential Prize. Each students received a cash prize of HK$1,500 as a token of appreciation during the ceremony. Professor Li Wai-keung, Dean of FLASS, was invited to attend the award presentation ceremony.

The Huawei ICT Competition is a prestigious global event designed to foster competitive ICT talent among college students. Developed by Huawei, this initiative aims to enhance the ICT talent ecosystem and facilitate the integration of industry and education. The competition consists of both practice and innovation segments. Each year, the theme of the practice competition rotates among Network, Cloud, Computing, and Ascend AI tracks, assessing students' theoretical knowledge and practical ICT skills as well as their teamwork capabilities. The innovation competition evaluates students’ ability to use ICTs (such as AI IoT, big data, and cloud) to address real-life problems, propose solutions with social and business value, and design models with comprehensive functions.

The Huawei ICT Competition 2024/25 is conducted at national, regional, and global levels. While national competitions have already taken place in various countries and cities from October to 15 December 2024, seven regional competitions held for participants from Middle East and Central Asia, Asia Pacific, Chinese Mainland, Latin America, Southern Africa, Northern Africa and Europe respectively will conclude in February 2025. The Huawei ICT Competition 2024/25 Global Final will be held in Shenzhen between 20 and 24 May 2025.

This recent event marked the fourth time that Huawei Hong Kong organised the Huawei ICT Competition - Hong Kong Station, which attracted over 900 participants from thirteen local universities to explore emerging technologies. During the award ceremony for this station, awards were presented to eighteen winning individuals from various higher education institutions in Hong Kong. This year’s practice competition was held under the Cloud track, where all three students from EdUHK won the potential prize.

All three members of the EdUHK team are from the Department of Mathematics and Information Technology: Mr Kadirbergenuly Nurtas and Ms Wang Yun-wen are both first-year students enrolled in the Bachelor of Science (Honours) in Artificial Intelligence and Education Technology (BSc(AI&EdTech)) programme; Mr Wong Fat-shing is a third-year student in the Bachelor of Education (Honours) (Secondary) - Information and Communication Technology (BEd-(S)ICT) programme.

“I have learnt a lot from this competition. It raised my sense of teamwork and broadened my horizons regarding new technologies. It instilled in me a passion for the subject. I also realised my weaknesses through this competition. While I am considering entering again, I need to brush up on my knowledge in ICT so that I have a higher chance to win,” Ms Wang Yun-wen said.

“We always encourage our students to participate in public competitions that can ignite a passion for learning and motivate them to engage more deeply with their subjects. The Huawei competition provided an opportunity for our students to understand their technical level compared to peers from other institutions. I hope this experience helped strengthen our students’ skills in applying their knowledge to solve real-life problems,” said Dr Henry So Chi-fuk, advisor to the MIT team.