EEE Student Places in Finals of the 16th APICTA Awards 2016 held in Taiwan

Md. Rakin Sarder Arko, an undergraduate student from the Electrical and Electronic Engineering (EEE) department of Independent University, Bangladesh (IUB) participated in the finals of the 16th Asia Pacific Information and Communication Technology Alliance (APICTA) Awards 2016 held in Taiwan from Dec 2-5 in Taiwan’s capital Taipei. A national team of Bangladesh under the leadership of Mustafa Jabbar, President of BASIS and Russell T Ahmed, Senior Vice-President of BASIS participated in this international competition for the first time. Delegations from IUB, NSU, BUET and ten of the BASIS member companies competed with participants of sixteen member states of Asia Pacific ICT Alliance. Md. Rakin Sarder from EEE department of IUB received the nomination for APICTA Awards 2016 and participated in the finals of the competition under the education category.
APICTA – Asia Pacific ICT Alliance, is an alliance of national ICT organizations representing their respective economy to build and enhance a mutually cooperative network to promote ICT, enhance technology innovations, capability and adoption, and encourage the development of indigenous ICT solutions for the global market. Every year APICTA Award is being awarded to the most prominent projects of the ICT industry. Over the last decade, APICTA Award has grown in stature. Its prominence, credibility and reputation have seen the award series dubbed the “Oscars of the ICT arena”.
Australia, Bangladesh, Brunei Darussalam, China, Chinese Taipei, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, Macao, Malaysia, Myanmar, Pakistan, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Vietnam and Nepal are the member-economies of the APICTA. Last year, Bangladesh was selected as member of this regional business body.More than 650 delegates with 238 projects participated in 17 different categories, 15 of them are for IT companies and IT innovations and 2 of them are education categories. The adjudicating process of this competition is very difficult and intense, as the judging mechanism follows a strict judging manual. From Bangladesh 3 student teams including IUB participated in the Tertiary Student Project category. Md. Rakin Sarder presented his team project named “Guardian of the Air” in the final competition. His other team members are Raihanul Bashar Fahim, RayhanSardarTipu and Mir Noor UlHaquePias from the Dept of CSE, IUB. Rakin reached as the top finalists where Hong Kong and Pakistan jointly won the award in this category.Kranti Associations from Bangladesh won a Runners up (Merit) award under the category Sustainability and Environment Technology. Bangladesh has also been selected to organize APICTA Awards 2017 in Dhaka. A special ceremony was held to handover the APICTA flag to Bangladesh Team for the next year’s event.
The whole event comprised of the nominee judging, APICTA Ex-Co meetings, Business Matchmaking, Startup day and student workshop. Taiwan and Hong Kong arranged special IT Nights with cultural function on 3 and 4 December respectively. The Awards ceremony of the winners followed by the Gala Dinner was held on 5 December 2016.