Search engine for children wins award
Radboud University computer science thesis receives award from Aia Software
Nijmegen, 22 December 2005 - For the third consecutive year Aia Software awards prizes for the best computer science thesis to students from Radboud University in Nijmegen. The prize for the best Bachelor thesis was aware ded to Sjors Meekels for his research in Autonomy in Software Architectures. The 'Giggle- search engine for kids' a joint project by Renkse Weeda and Jolanda van Gendt won the Master thesis award. The jury consists of lecturers from the Radboud University Faculty of Computing Science and Aia Software senior managers.
Renske and Jolanda's Masters thesis addresses the issue that children searching the internet often find results that are unsuitable for their age group due to, for example, language which is too difficult or contains expletives, or inappropriate subjects such as pornography, violence, racism etc. Besides that the approach to searching does not correspond with the capacity and the knowledge of a child. After extensive research they came up with a prototype for a self-learning and automated system for the target group of 8-12 years. It consists of a visual representation for navigation through the cyberworld, support with the expansion and tuning of the search question and achievement of search results that correspond more appropriately to the question and which are both readable and safe and that can be stored at any time. The jury is of the opinion that they have combined reliable and valuable research with innovative design and a working prototype. Their approach is considered to be very systematic and academically justified.
Sjors Meekel's Bachelor thesis focuses on research into Autonomy in Software Architectures, on both a theoretical and practical level. The jury considered this work to be a fine example of quality experimental academic research.
Paul Dirven, CEO Aia Software:"As software developers, coming from the university of Nijmegen, we consider it important to stimulate education and research in Computer Science. That is the main reason why we introduced the Aia Software Awards. The winning thesis were selected from a large number of competing entries and once again we are delighted with the high quality: the future of the Dutch knowledge economy is in good shape!"