Han Ximin

ximhan@126.com

A TOTAL of 28 projects will share 3.6 million yuan (US$544,700) in prizes awarded at the 2020 Shenzhen Dream Catcher Cup University Students Innovation and Entrepreneurship Contest which officially ended Friday.

The contest was divided between the fresh graduate category and the on-campus student category.

In the fresh graduate category, the green and efficient preparation technology of high frequency copper clad laminate, a project headed by Zhou Lin, won the top prize of 500,000 yuan.

According to Zhou Lin, the project realized preparation for making two-layer copper foil for ultra thin flexible copper clad laminate in one step by adopting magnetron sputtering technologies.

Experts believe the technology will push forward the development of vacuum equipment technology and the high frequency copper clad laminate industry.

The AI-driven desk-top pet robots with perception and expression functions won second prize in the category of fresh graduates.

In the category of on-campus students, a student team of Tsinghua Shenzhen Graduate School won first prize by developing the Muller polarizing biomicroscope, which is used in early stages of cancer screening.

“The sample devices had been put into use at 13 hospitals in Shenzhen to collect data. They can cut the test time from half a day to half an hour. At the same time, it can improve the diagnosis accuracy through AI automated recognition,” Wang Jing, the team leader, said.

The winning projects were selected from preliminaries, training camps and final contests that lasted six months. A total of 480 projects from 205 higher learning institutions, including 20 from overseas, joined in the contest.

According to Shi Xianyin, vice director of the Shenzhen Public Employment Service Center, the items that entered into the contest have high-tech content. They are mainly in bio-pharmacy, computer and Internet sectors. Nearly 70 percent of participants have bachelor’s degrees or above. Master’s degree holders make up 30 percent.

According to the rules, on-campus students and those who have graduated in the past five years can apply for the contest if they plan to start a business or have registered a startup business.

To offset the impact of COVID-19, this year the contest organizer had increased loan guarantees for individuals to start up businesses from 300,000 yuan to 600,000 yuan. For partnership businesses, the maximum total of the combined loan is 5 million yuan.