Education

CEAT partners AIESEC for Youth empowerment initiative

A Youth Empowerment Programme designed to reach 8,000 young Sri Lankans on the threshold of their careers, is to get underway in January 2013 through a partnership between Sri Lanka's top tyre brand CEAT and AIESEC, the world's largest youth-run organization.

CEAT Kelani Holdings has been designated 'National Partner' for the Programme, which will comprise of 80 Youth Empowerment sessions to be conducted by AIESEC Interns from the association's global resource network at leading tertiary level education institutes in Colombo.

Vice President Sales and Marketing at CEAT Ravi Dadlani and the President of AIESEC Sri Lanka Shanaka Chathuranga, exchange the MoU in the presence of CEAT Marketing Manager Bishri Latiff and Mario Jayawardena, President of the Organizing Committee of the AIESEC Youth Empowerment Project.

A Memorandum of Understanding signed by CEAT and AIESEC Sri Lanka envisages that these sessions, conducted between January and March 2013, will culminate in a Youth Empowerment Day -- a full day public programme conducted for an estimated 1,000 students by representatives from various industries and corporate sector entities on career guidance and self development.

The initiative, supported under CEAT Kelani Holdings' 'CEAT Cares' portfolio of community commitments, dovetails with the 'Shaksham' series of personal development programmes conducted by the company in Sri Lanka over the past two years.

"Self confidence and personal grooming skills are key requisites to securing career opportunities that match the aspirants' potential," said Tanmay Agarwal, Managing Director and CEO of CEAT Kelani. "Through the Shaksham programme, which is modeled on an initiative by our parent group in India, CEAT has already impacted the lives of many young Sri Lankans. This latest programme in partnership with AIESEC is a significant expansion of our commitment."

The AIESEC Youth Empowerment sessions will cover topics such as understanding the external environment (local & global context), leadership and self development, understanding individual competencies, being socially responsible and skills development in the areas of public speaking, presentations, team management, time management and effective usage of virtual platforms. Each of the 10 educational institutions identified for the programme is expected to nominate a minimum of 100 students, who will follow eight sessions over the three months.

Sri Lanka's leading pneumatic tyre manufacturer, CEAT Kelani is majority-owned and managed by the RPG Group of India, whose annual turnover exceeds US$ 4.5 billion. CEAT has three manufacturing units in Sri Lanka manufacturing truck, light truck, radial, motorcycle, three-wheeler and agricultural tyres and a total workforce of 900 employees.

The company is the market leader in the commercial tyre segment, and is the largest selling single brand in the radial segment.

International Conference on Advances in ICT in Dec.

International Conference on Advances in ICT for Emerging Regions is the successor to the seminal International Information Technology Conference (IITC) will be held at BMICH, on December 13 and 14. The emphasis on this year's conference will be on areas such as Language Processing, Image Processing and Virtual Reality, Systems and Performance evaluation, e-learning, Knowledge based Systems and Machine Learning and Social Applications.

The Research Symposium, Workshops and Tutorials will be held at University of Colombo School of Computing (UCSC), Reid Avenue, Colombo 07. The conference will also include a pre-conference student research symposium presenting postgraduate and undergraduate work on 12th December and a number of tutorials and workshops in areas of current interest in Information and Communication Technology on 12 and 15 of December.

The event was held in Sri Lanka since 1998. It provides a unique platform for both local and foreign Computer Scientists and IT Professionals to present their research. In order to get wider international participation and to promote computing research in the fast emerging regions of the world especially in Asia-Pacific, it was decided to broadbase the conference and link it with the related International Journal ICTer (www.icter.org).

The proceedings of ICTer2012 will be published in both book and online versions with an ISBN number and also in IEEE Explore and Google Scholar. Selected Papers will be invited for the publications in the ICTer Journal.

Conference program will consist of three Keynote Speeches, five Invited Talks, 18 Full Papers, 11 Short Papers and six posters. Apart from the main conference, there will be three Workshops and two tutorials and a student research symposium with 17 paper presentations as Pre and Post Conference activities on December from 12 to 15.

IEEE and all full papers that will be presented at the ICTer conference will be included in the IEEE digital library, the IEEE Xplore (http://ieeexplore.ieee.org).

The delegates to the conference will be addressed by several keynote speakers and invited speakers with international reputation in the field of ICT. Among them are, Professor R.K. Shyamsunder, Senior Professor and JC Bose National Fellow, Faculty of Technology & Computer Science, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai. He will speak on "Multicore and Extreme Scale Computing: Programming and Software Challenges", a very pertinent topic today for programmers. Another speaker, Professor Love Ekenberg is the Head of Department of Computer and Systems Sciences, Stockholm University, Sweden. Professor Ekenberg has two doctoral degrees in Computer Science and Mathematics and is a well know researcher in Europe.

He will be talking about "Decision Analysis in Societal Planning". Dr George Weir, the third key note speaker is a senior academic in the Department of Computer and Information Sciences, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, United Kingdom. In addition to the main conference, there will be two days of pre-conference and post-conference activities allowing participants to gain a wider conference experience. More details could be obtained from http://www.icter.org/conference/programme