Shanghai Jiao Tong University Students Prepare Themselves for Industrial AI Applications with Excellence in Innovation Program
“The Excellence in Innovation Program provides a great way for our Excellent Engineers class to collaborate with experts and learn about industry trends in cutting-edge areas such as AI. Moreover, hands-on projects help students, who previously had only superficial MATLAB programming skills and were unfamiliar with Simulink, understand and use toolboxes, successfully complete projects, and enhance their engineering skills.”
Key Outcomes
- Students successfully completed seven projects within the timeframe of the course, gaining a deeper understanding of AI algorithms and applications
- The Excellence in Innovation Program helped accelerate the progress of projects and optimized classroom teaching time
- Students enhanced their MATLAB programming skills, as well as their engineering problem-solving and innovation abilities
In the Voice Controlled Robot project, students worked on real-time speech recognition with microphones using the scalograms of the audio signals.
Engineering Practice and Technology Innovation IV (Excellent Engineers) is a compulsory course for engineering students at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Professor Yuhong Yang, who teaches the class, aims to cultivate her students’ research and innovation skills with practical exercises in proactive thinking, self-learning, and problem-solving. However, the course faced two challenges: Existing projects were out of date and students were barely supported by engineers from enterprises in a timely manner.
The Excellence in Innovation Program is a design and research program for undergraduate and graduate students that focuses on industry applications and technology trends. The program provides curated problem descriptions, suggested approaches, resources to get started, and user-friendly discussion forums. In this course, the program supported projects related to AI in image processing, IC design, wireless, and other fields, some of which also focused on hardware platform design. Students worked in groups to develop and deploy AI algorithms.
For Professor Yang and the students, the program provided an opportunity to work on cutting-edge applications and interact with industry experts. Students with no previous experience using MATLAB® and Simulink® were able to complete engineering projects using MATLAB in just one semester.
