Informatics Institute of Technology wins international awards

Lahiru wins merit award at APICTA Amani wins the second merit award

Lahiru Lakmal Priyadarshana, a student of Informatics Institute of Technology (IIT), won the Gold Award in the Tertiary Category as well as the award for the Best Product developed using Open Source Tools for his iDisplay project.

The latter was introduced for the first time at NBQSA. Amani Soysa, also a student of IIT, was awarded the Bronze for her Chord A Tune Project. Lahiru and Amani won these awards competing with the cream of software engineering students from more than five state universities and private institutes.

Informatics Institute of Technology wins international awards

Lahiru and Amani were nominated to represent Sri Lanka at APICTA 2009, which was held in Melbourne, Australia, as part of the Asia Pacific Digital Innovation Summit. The Asia Pacific ICT Awards (APICTA) is an international awards programme which aims to increase ICT awareness in the Asian Continent and assist in bridging the digital divide.

By providing networking and product benchmarking opportunities to ICT innovators and entrepreneurs in the region, the programme is designed to stimulate ICT innovation and creativity, promote economic and trade relations, facilitate technology transfer, and offer business matching opportunities via exposure to venture capitalists and investors.

Amani wins the second merit award

Lahiru and Amani won the prestigious merit awards, competing against more than 12 countries representing the Asia Pacific region, including Singapore, India, China, Australia and Malaysia. The goal of Lahiru's iDisplay is to identify a Computer Vision-Based Solution to Retrofit Existing Flat Displays into Interactive Surfaces. Interactive interfaces provide novel ways of interaction by closely replicating the familiar hands-on experience of everyday object manipulation.

Unfortunately, most of the currently available interactive surfaces are based on infrared sensing and projection that necessitates a considerable monetary investment and a higher level of engineering knowledge. iDisplay is a solution to overcome these problems in a novel way with minimal cost and engineering efforts.

The hardware prototype of iDisplay includes a minimum number of hardware devices, a webcam and an LCD monitor. Amani addresses the problem of harmonizing music, which is a tedious task for novice musicians. Chord A Tune is a solution for the above dilemma that facilitates the harmonizing of a given melody allowing the user to incorporate emotional factor and genre choice.

Chord A Tune uses a machine learning approach with Hidden Markov Model that generates the chord progression for a given melody by embedding the emotional factor. Around 250 lead sheets were used to train this system, using a data driven and heuristic approach. Furthermore, Chord A Tune opens a path for research into chord progression generation for vocals, that takes into account the extraction of words, emotional factor and the tune from the actual voice of the user.

The achievements of these students are an example of the strong foundation that IIT builds for its students which enables them to achieve their goals. It also portrays the devotion of the staff who are constantly at hand to guide their students.