The 12th Annual National Best Quality Software Awards (NBQSA) competition organized by the British Computer Society (BCS) Sri Lanka, was held at Galadari Hotel on October 1 2010, amidst a distinguished audience comprising of the cream of the IT professionals in the country.

Marking a milestone, Mohamed Hamzeen, a student of Informatics Institute of Technology (IIT) won the Gold award in the tertiary category. This is the second time in succession that IIT won Gold at this prestigious event. BCS has been organizing this event since 1998 and is the only national event dedicated to showcasing the exemplary innovativeness of the students in the tertiary education sector. In addition to the BCS awards several other special awards were presented to students in the tertiary sector. Hamzeen secured the 'most innovative ICT product' and the Best Product developed using Open Source Technology.

The nominations for these awards are carefully evaluated by a panel of judges comprising of highly acclaimed individuals from various professional bodies and industrial associations. Hamzeen won these awards competing with the cream of software engineering students from more than five state universities and private institutes, all competing for the Gold Trophy. The ever-increasing participation of students has resulted in a stringent judging process by an expert panel of judges. Of 95 contestants, only 11 projects made it to the final round. Being one of only two individual projects in the final round, Hamzeen truly deserves these awards for his outstanding skills.

Hamzeen's project "Engage" attempts to design and implement a human centric alternative natural interaction framework. The framework utilises computer vision and signal processing for real time recognition of hand gestures using a regular webcam and cell phone with a three-axis accelerometer and it enables interaction using tangible real world objects in the form of fiduciary markers. Furthermore, multi-user interaction capability with fiduciary marker detection was exploited to build a public display to be utilized as a commercial advertising and branding tool. The framework uses commonly available hardware and requires minimal engineering effort from users.

Hamzeen will represent Sri Lanka at the Asia Pacific ICT Awards (APICTA), which is to be held in Malaysia from October 11 to 16.The achievements of Hamzeen and his predecessors who won Gold and Bronze in 2009 are an example of the strong foundation IIT builds for its students. The third year of the four year degree programme being in industry is a unique feature that gives students exposure to the real world of work. The fourth and final year is devoted to applying their learning in the creation of innovative projects.

The students are backed and guided by their tutors in their endeavours to achieve their goals. "Cutting Edge" another unique creation of IIT is where all these final year projects are exhibited, judged and awarded prizes. With all these unique features built into the IIT degree programmes, winning Gold at the NBSQA is not surprising. Making it two in a row proves our point beyond doubt. Congratulations to the students and staff.