E- Forum: Bringing IT academics and industrialists together
The Expose Forum, also known as the E-Forum for 2014 organised by the E-Club of the University of Moratuwa took place recently at the BMICH. The event also marked the 2013 edition of the ‘E-Carrier’ magazine. While bringing IT engineers, academics as well as IT students under one roof, this year the organisers broadened the scope by bringing in businessmen and investors also into the forum. The idea was to inform businessmen about the developments of the local IT market as well as provide graduates with an idea of their potential job market. In short the event was organised to provide a platform for discussion for industrialists and IT academics and professionals.
“We have received a 25 million grant from the world bank as a part of a project. This is very important to us as our annual grant itself is only 3 million. We have so far received more than 5 grants all adding up to about 20 million. We are now more focused on research and development. We are also the first university to offer a degree programme in bio medical engineering. Our main concern is to recognise trends as well as the gaps in the field and direct our students appropriately. For example, the telecommunication industry now contributes towards the GDP,” said the Head of the department of Electronic and Telecommunication engineering, Dr. Ajith Pasqual.
The final year students then presented their final year projects which the chief guest commended by saying they were of an international standard. While one group showed an interconnected hospital system another group had created a traffic monitoring and updating system through mobile apps. Other projects included a wireless network for oceanographic studies through android media and intelligent video surveillance software which detects idlers and crowd movements. The most intriguing project put forward was a teleprocess robot, complete with object recognition and motion which could represent a person unable to be present at a specific location through video feeds. This robot is also one of the few in the world to have a manipulative arm with 5 joints which could move with a speed of 15 cm per second.
The highlight of the forum was the panel discussion that took place with Dr. Pasqual as the moderator. The discussion was conducted under the theme, “Facilitating new directions for the industry and our graduates”. Each panelist was posed the question on how IT could be used to increase productivity and output in their respective fields.
The question was first put forward to Director of Brandix Lanka Ltd, Udena Wickramasooriya who said the country has potential to increase its output and already our per capita exports were the highest in the world and even higher than China. He commented that Brandix had already successfully launched the world’s fastest networking system in their branch in India and it was very successful. In his speech he commented that the country’s potential could be improved by nurturing an environment that encourages anyone to failure without being ashamed. Adding that it was the only way to attract more entrepreneurs in to the market. “We need to stop looking at every industry separately. For example, without looking at washing machines, clothes and detergent separately, if someone invents a material that doesn’t need washing, that means three different industries merging in to one. We need to start thinking big,” he said.
The executive director and chief scientist at Millennium IT, Ajit Senanayake said that the IT industry and its related jobs were knowledge intensive. He commented that they currently own a messaging network which has a 50 microsecond speed and can send up to a million messages per second. Speaking about the international market space for consumer electronic products the CEO of CodeGen Harsha Subasingha explained that the largest problem so far was the lack of dedication. “We need to have a passion for the work we do. A person who never plays video games cannot make a game story. We need to find those who are passionate for a job to perform that job the best. The first thing we need to do is create passion in our country,” said Mr. Subasingha.
Senior lecturer of the university and former dean of the information technology department Prof. Dileeka Dias said the largest opportunity right now is the electronic revolution which is taking place globally. She added it was something that graduates could take part in as the only upper limit of the revolution was to find a problem that we have, and try to find a solution through our imagination.