Young innovator brings her ideas West

She’s designed everything from an eye-dropper aid for people with trembling hands to a smart car and various image recognition, and processing systems. Haining Wu describes her innovations and compares her life in China with the Netherlands.

‘What I like about working in the Netherlands,’ said the 24-year-old master’s student of electric engineering, ‘is that the Dutch put all the questions on the table, and work together as a team to try and solve them. Chinese people tend to try and solve the problems first, and then discuss them. This, I believe, is because we are concerned about “saving face”.’

‘Much of the political behavior of the Chinese government is also about saving face,’ she continued. ‘That is part of the reason we don’t have Facebook or Google in China. We know that the Chinese students who protested in Tiananmen Square, in 1989, were courageous. Today, Chinese students are also brave when they freely share their thoughts on the internet.’

Wu comes from Nanjing and has been at the UT for one year. She is now working as an intern at NXP, a semiconductor company in Nijmegen. Her task is to design an image processing system to locate the initial stage of the chip, called a die, as quickly and accurately as possible as it passes along the assembly line at a speed of millions of dies per minute. ‘The image processing is complicated,’ she explained, ‘because you need a lot of time to calculate the die pad’s position. I am trying to find the most robust algorithm to save time in the calculation without losing accuracy.’

Last year, Wu won the Orange Tulip Scholarship with Siqi Ding. ‘I was surprised by the honor,’ she said, ‘because so many Chinese students compete for the prize. But maybe I won because of my first place in the Altera Asia Innovation competition.’

In 2008, Wu worked with a team to design a new system for English speech training for hearing-impaired children. The system is imbedded with Nios II processors, a 32-bit embedded-processor architecture which makes the new design stable, portable, and inexpensive. Wu and her team published a paper about their award-winning project at the International Conference on Computer Engineering and Technology (ICCET) last year.

Wu also worked on a facial recognition system that collected static facial images from a camera and then recognized them from a database. ‘Technically, the features with the most differences are eye size, face shape, and hair color,’ she said. But actually, I used the mathematical procedure called principal component analysis and combined all the features into a single recognizable matrix.’ Principal component analysis transforms a number of possibly correlated variables into a smaller number of uncorrelated variables.

But that’s not all. Wu also helped design an aid for applying eye drops, especially for older patients who struggle with trembling hands. ‘Our project group came up with five different ideas,’ she said smiling. ‘But the idea for the final product came from the plastic covers McDonalds uses for take-away drinks. We noticed that these covers have a cross-slit used for the beverage straw. From this, we imagined a cap with a cross-joint that could accommodate eye-drop bottles with different sizes.’

Wu is very pleased with her decision to come to the UT. ‘I have a happy life here,’ she said. ‘Studying and working abroad has helped me to grow up. I am more pragmatic and innovative. I like my major more and more. And I’ve become more social and not so shy. Here, in the Netherlands, I feel free.’

‘I know many international students now and they are very curious about China. It’s a nice experience to discuss our different cultures, languages, and share our different food.’ Wu hopes to finish her master’s degree in the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science next year and would like to continue working abroad for a few more years before returning to China. Meanwhile, she misses her family and friends, real Chinese cuisine, and singing karaoke. ‘Everyone in China sings karaoke,’ she said. ‘It’s cheap and fun. But here, karaoke is not so popular.’

Wu enjoys playing badminton, reading historical novels about ancient China, playing keyboard, and travel photography. (Photo: Gijs van Ouwerkerk)