CSE Students Received the Silver Award and Special Mention of HKUST President's Cup 2022

The HKUST President's Cup is an annual campus-wide competition that invites undergraduate students to embark on a tenacious pursuit of excellence in research and innovation. In HKUST President's Cup 2022, a project supervised by Dr. Desmond TSOI received the Silver Award, and a project supervised by Dr. Dimitrios PAPADOPOULOS received the Special Mention.

Silver Award - Cnails: Cloud IDE tailor for UST Programming Courses

Supervised by Dr. Desmond TSOI, the project "Cnails: Cloud IDE tailor for UST Programming Courses" done by COMP students WONG Yan Ho, CHIN Tian You and YEUNG Man Lung Ken was awarded President's Cup Silver Award this year.

"Cnails" is a combination of programming environment management platform for instructors and web based IDE for instructors. Users can access the courses that they have enrolled in the semester with their corresponding role permissions. If they are instructors (or teaching assistants), they can define programming environments for students. The programming environments can be either predefined by our system or customized by instructors. Then instructors can associate some code templates (e.g. skeleton code for assignments or exams) to the programming environment. When a template is published, students can open an IDE with all the packages installed, configuration set properly, and have their code inside their working directory. Cnails standardizes the programming environment of assignments and exams by providing a distributed lightweight virtual environment. It provides an IDE on the browser, which people can use on their desktop, laptop or tablets. The functionality of the IDE is extensible to improve the teaching and learning experience. It provides a new way to conduct computer-based programming exams. It could be super useful for MOOCs where people want a code as you learn experience.

Poster of the Cnails project

Photo of COMP students: WONG Yan Ho, CHIN Tian You and YEUNG Man Lung Ken

Dashboard page of Cnails, showing active workspaces and courses

Instructors' perspective of a course, showing an environment column and a template column

A form to create a predefined programming environment

Students' perspective of a course, showing all the published assignments and exams (if any)

Cnails provide users with IDE on browser, which is extremely similar to Visual Studio Code

Special Mention - VaxPass: Decentralized Two-Tier Verifiable Blockchain Platform for COVID-19 Certificate Verification

The Special Mention was presented to TIAN Xiangan (COMP & MATH(GM)), WU Lijia (COMP) and WU Yijian (COMP) for their project "VaxPass: Decentralized Two-Tier Verifiable Blockchain Platform for COVID-19 Certificate Verification" supervised by Dr. Dimitrios PAPADOPOULOS.

As many countries around the globe have adopted a COVID-19 vaccine passport system to fight against Corona Virus and protect public health, this project introduces the design and implementation of VaxPass, an end-to-end decentralized blockchain-based vaccine passport verification system that provides a secure and reliable way for certificate storage issuing and verification. VaxPass utilizes a two-tier verifiable blockchain architecture for better scalability and maintainability. The first tier consists of several Local Chains, each maintained by the groups of institutions (such as vaccine producers, labs, hospitals, etc.) in one country or jurisdiction. Such Local Chains store detailed information on the certificates and individuals have their vaccine records stored on their respective Local Chain. The second tier is a single Global Chain implemented via a permissioned blockchain whose nodes are maintained by the respective authorities in different countries. Periodically, each authority generates a short proof-of-validity of all the certificates issued within its jurisdiction within a period (as stored in its Local Chain) and records it on the Global Chain. Using cryptographic hash mechanisms for this step makes interacting with the Global Chain extremely lightweight. Following this design, vaccination records (and other health-critical information) can be efficiently shared and verified across the globe, e.g., via travelling individuals. As part of this project, the students designed and prototyped all components of VaxPass, including a mobile app for individual users to store and share their records, a web platform for issuing organisations and the necessary blockchain back-end systems.