ABU DHABI // An ambitious young computer programmer has been recognised for his contributions to improving campus life at New York University Abu Dhabi.
Juan Felipe Beltran received the Max Goldstein Prize for Creativity in Computer Science for creating an iPad application that makes voting in student elections quicker, simpler and more accurate.
His app links the iPad to a radio-frequency identification reader via bluetooth. Students swipe their ID cards across the reader to vote.
The system has been used in three student elections and is to be introduced at NYU in the United States.
The 22-year-old Columbian, who grew up in Chile, was accepted at the Abu Dhabi university in 2010 and is about to begin his final year of study. He hopes to continue working on projects to improve university life.
Mr Beltran said that because the Abu Dhabi university was relatively new, there were plenty of areas for improvement.
"We didn't have a lot of specific infrastructure for us, so one of the things we were encouraged to do was create software for the community," he said.
"During a summer break I was talking to the student president and they were looking at the voting system and how inconvenient it was to vote using paper, so I looked at how we could use iPads to vote online."
For Mr Beltran, the Abu Dhabi campus was the ideal place to put theory into practice.
"Because it is a small community, you get a perfect bubble to check your projects to see how people react to things," he said. "Everyone is excited for you, the computer science faculty is really supportive."
An active member of the international student community, Mr Beltran also spoke at the TEDxNYU event last month at the New York campus to highlight other areas of his research.
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