For the second year in a row, the ETIC has awarded the Award to the best Final Year Project in Spain in Information and Communications Technologies in the areas related to ICT and its research masters. As an innovation this year, the Department has hosted a ceremony where the winners have had the opportunity to present their projects. The act of delivery of the awards has taken place on September 23rd in the Poblenou Auditorium. It was presided by Miquel Oliver, director; Anders Jonsson, deputy director; Emilia Homez, deputy director and Xavier Serra, director of the Maria de Maeztu Program. Within the Welcome to the ETIC's masters program.The assessor committee, formed by members of the UPF's Information and Communications Technologies Department, has decided to divide the II Final Year Project Award ex aequo and award it to:

NATÀLIA DELGADO, for Desarrollo de un software de sincronización automática entre tonalidades y colores en musicoterapia audiovisual

Graduate of the Technical University of Eindhoven and Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Natalia's project consists in the automation of the synchronization between music and color, designed for purposes related to music therapy. The idea behind this concept is using the color as a new dimension capable of interpreting visually the complex variations in music and this project suggests generating a product capable of executing these concepts solving the problem of efficiency through automation. Natalia enrolls now in the Master in Sound and Music

ARANTXA CASANOVA, for Fusion of 3D Data for Interactive Applications.

Graduate of UPC's ETSETB, Arantxa's project has the aim of presenting the implementation of several register algorithms for the fusion of 3D data, with the result of an increase of the area of detection in interactive applications. This project compares the register of two sensors of depth obtained from its calibration by means of a geometric patron and the obtained from the automatic register using the detection of a human finger as a reference. Using a finger detector instead of a geometric patron provides a main advantage: the method is more easy to use for the user, since no external objects are needed, while the time used and the register error are similar to those obtained with the classic calibration of the sensors. Arantxa will do the inter-university master coordinated by the UAB Master in Computer Vision.

The Maria de Maeztu Mention for the Reproductibility in Software - Award to the Best Final Year Project in Spain, goes to:

ADRIÀ GARRIGA, for Solving Montezuma's Revenge with Planning and Reinforcement Learning

Graduate of the UPF, Adrià's project focuses on an Atari game which has become infamous for its difficulty: Montezuma's Revenge. Traditionally, methods for solving Sequential Decision Processes (SDPs) have not worked well with those that feature sparse feedback. With the resounding success of Deep Q-Networks (Mnih et al., 2015) in Atari games, Montezuma’s Revenge is precisely characterized by its sparse feedback. Adrià will take the master in Oxford.

(Text en anglès de la notícia publicada pel ETIC)