May 2011 Electric Guitar Project Scoops Avaya Prize

Gearóid Moroney, a final year student in Electronic & Computer Engineering at NUI Galway has been awarded the Avaya Prize for the best final year project in Electrical & Electronic Engineering in the College of Engineering & Informatics at NUI Galway. His project involved the development of a web based system to allow a remote user to automatically tune and then play an electric guitar.

A native of Ennis, Co. Clare, Gearóid beat a number of other challengers whose projects included a mobile phone application to allow older people to monitor and manage their nutritional intake and exercise levels, and a novel electronic circuit used to increase the efficiency of generators, which utilise energy wasted by the forms of basic cookers used in households in developing countries, to produce electricity.

Dr Michael Keane, Senior Manager with Avaya in Galway commented: “Avaya are delighted to continue with the sponsorship of this prize. We have recently announced expansion plans involving 75 new positions, many of which will be filled by graduates with the types of technical skills that we have seen in abundance in all of these excellent projects. We were greatly impressed by the standard of all the projects which we reviewed but Gearóid’s project was particularly innovative. It involved the very challenging task of developing a number of different pieces of software and custom electronic hardware and then getting them all to work together to deliver a very novel and fun application.”