LAHORE: Students of the Punjab University College of Information Technology (PUCIT) have won nine out of 11 competitions in the recently organised SoftExpo 2016, Daily Times has learnt. The teams of 630 students from 42 universities had 48 projects selected to compete for 11 top prizes.The students belonged to institutions from across the nation, including UET (Lahore, Faisalabad), PUCIT, FAST (Lahore, Faisalabad), LUMS, GCU Lahore, UCP, UMT, VU, UoL, ITU, LCWU, Queen Marry College, University of Haripur, COMSATS (Lahore, Sahiwal, WahCantt), BZU (Lahore, Sahiwal), AIOU, Lahore Garrison University, GIFT, Hajveri, NUML, Bahria University (Lahore, Karachi), University of Sargodha, and University of Gujrat. Forty judges from eight academic institutions and 14 technology companies decided the winners. In the undergraduate software competition, the team of Nimra Gulshan, Ayesha Riaz, Sameea Fatima and Rabia Riaz from PUCIT won the mega prize of Rs 50,000 for their project, Technology for Litigation. This project was also adjudged as the winner of the best undergraduate research project. The Viewers’ Choice Award went to Waqas Yousaf, Nouman Asif, Sohail Shaukat, Fahad Rafi, and Mahad Waseem from PUCIT with software project titled “Audit Wheel”. Asher Toqeer, Saqib Mirza, M Ahmad, and Abdul Rehman from PUCIT won the best innovative idea and the best mobile application awards for their software titled “Smart Mobile Manager – Savvy Apps”. The best web application award was given to Muhammad Hassan Riaz, Uzair Aslam, Mateen Yaseen, Mughes Syed, and Muhammad Usama Khalid from PUCIT with software project titled “Electroid”. The PUCIT team of Umar Shabbir Chaudhary, Muhammad Ahmad, and Shahzad Iftikhar won the coveted the clash of coder speed programming competition. In online gaming, Irteza Shaukat from TEVTA Secretariat won the GameCon—Tekken’6 competition and Adil Tahir from Lahore Garrison University won the GameCon–FIFA’16 competition. Haider, Muhammad Haris, and Talal from PUCIT won the cryptography and clue-based puzzle-solving competition, the Scavenger Hunt. The PUCIT students; Amshee Hassan, Abdullah Khawar, and Suleman Muqeet also won the first ever artificially intelligent agent-based game programming competition, the Code Bot Competition. Finally, Muhammad Umer Farooq won the maiden and the first of its kind graduate research symposium for his research paper “A Fast and Improved Hough Transform based Ellipse Detector using 1D Parametric Space”. Dr Muhammad Nazar Khan, a Fulbright scholar in the area of computer vision, supervised this research. Primary sponsors included Ozi Technology, Habib Bank Limited, Confiz Solutions, Ebryx, and PITB TechHub. Rs 265,000 were given as prize money to the winners and runners up. Ozi Technology and Habib Bank Limited were the top sponsors of the event. Winners and runners up also received shields, and all 630 participants received certificates. HEC Executive Director Dr Arshad Ali, Dr ZartashUzmi (a professor at LUMS and board member at Confiz Solutions), and Ahrar Naqvi (Ebryx CEO) distributed prizes and certificates among the participants.