TAR UMT Students Bag WorldSkills Asia Top Prize in Cloud Computing

TAR UMT had the honour to host the WorldSkills Asia Online Friendly Skills Games 2021 cloud computing category on 2 – 5 August 2021. During the competition, Lim Jun Rong and Lai Xin Yi, both TAR UMT students of the Bachelor of Computer Science (Hons) in Data Science, clinched the Gold medal along the way.

This event was supported by HuaweiCloud Malaysia and GMCM Sdn Bhd through their assistance in providing cloud computing facilities and competition format to be tested by competitors in this skills game. It is also participated by experts and 10 competitors from various countries namely Japan, Chinese Taipei, Indonesia, Iran, India, Russia, Korea and Malaysia. Ts Dr Tew Yiqi, Programme Leader and Senior Lecturer of the Faculty of Computing and Information Technology (‘FOCS’), was appointed as a chief expert of this event to lead other countries’ experts in promoting the cloud computing skills among the participating competitors.

“It is mainly about the exploration of the cloud computing skills needed for the Industrial Revolution 4.0 era. We were required to simulate the operation of a factory in the real world and perform cloud computing that focuses on big data analytics and artificial intelligence in the factory. Besides, we were also asked to explore the services in the HuaweiCloud, including Auto-scaling, Elastic Load Balancing, Relational Database Service, ModelArt and MapReduce Services. All these services are still very new in Malaysia and it requires further exploration by the industry players and undergraduates,” explained Jun Rong.

Xin Yi, shared about her experience during the competition. “This definitely was a great experience for us because it was a chance for us to represent Malaysia and to compete with other countries’ participants and share our ideas/solutions with them. At the beginning, I was very stressed up because I didn’t have much experience in the field of cloud computing. After having a discussion with my team, I felt much better and we just did our best to participate and enjoy the competition. Winning or losing was not our main concern. The most important thing for us was to gain new knowledge and experience from the competition. I was also very impressed with the experts. Being guided by them was really helpful for me in using all those services and in exploring all of them myself. Besides that, all of the other competitors’ performance was very good and I got a lot of ideas from them to help me improve, she said.

Ts Dr Tew Yiqi took great effort in being the host for the event and preparing TAR UMT students for the competition. “As part of the “package” in organising the cloud computing competition in WorldSkills Asia Online Friendly Skills Games 2021, we had to conduct a monthly training session (one day per month) from May - July, had online meet-up with experts and participants to experience the HuaweiCloud features. The test project was released earlier during the training session to allow all competitors to do self-training (with guidance from their coach and expert). Then the test project was modified on the day before the competition to test the actual skills gained by participants during the skills games period,” he said.