Ajman University Alumni win yet another QS Reimagine Education Award

Wednesday, Apr 07, 2021
Ajman University Alumni win yet another QS Reimagine Education Award

Ajman University is proud to announce that our alumni and faculty, Wessam Shehieb’ 14 and Ali Mohammed Ridha’ 19 have won the prestigious QS Reimagine Education Awards once again, this time for the Middle East region. Their innovative solution EchoV, which uses ­­­­­­­­­­technology to better fulfil the learning needs of the hearing impaired, was announced as the Silver Award winner for Middle East at the QS Maple 2021 Virtual Conference held from March 23-25, 2021.

The Solution has already won the Silver Award for Artificial Intelligence in the global edition of QS Reimagine Education Awards last year.

The 2020 Reimagine Education Awards witnessed intense competition from over 1400 university teams, ed-tech companies, teachers, and non-profits from 72 countries. EchoV emerged among the winners due to its unique Augmented Reality (AR)-based approach to resolving learning issues in the classroom for students with hearing loss.

EchoV includes AR glasses that enable real time speech conversion into easy to read text, speech emotion recognition to convey the mood of the person speaking, classroom assistive tools to take notes during lectures and environmental sounds indication to help the hearing impaired identify various ambient sounds.

Wessam and Ali Mohammed’s win once again underscores the fact that AU alumni and faculty are among the best in the world, when it comes to innovating for social impact. They successfully navigated multiple challenges in technological feasibility and affordability to come up with a unique and innovative educational tool for the hearing impaired.

Both the winners are Electrical Engineering alumni of Ajman University. Wessam is currently working as Assistant Instructor in the College of Engineering & IT (CEIT) at AU, while Ali Mohammed worked as Research Assistant with CEIT till recently. Their win at QS Reimagine is a well-deserved victory for creative endeavour and a testimony to AU’s continued commitment in using its resources to better serve the needs of the community and society.