Informatics student wins :

At the Asia Pacific ICT Awards (APICTA)

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.

Lahiru and Amani were nominated to represent Sri Lanka at APICTA 2009, which was held recently in Melbourne, Australia, as part of the Asia Pacific Digital Innovation Summit.

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 Asia Pacific ICT Awards (APICTA) is an international awards program 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 program was 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.

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.

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.

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.