This Entrepreneurial , Innovation and Pitching event had around 50 teams participating in the event after a preliminary qualification held offline. The competitors participated in the competition ranged from MSc Holders to Undergraduates. after the first round the team IT Crowd got selected to Top Six and after the second round they eventually went on to win the
completion. The Event was graced by more than 15 national and international entrepreneurs businessmen who appreciated the effort thrown in by the team.

The Idea Pitched by the Team IT crowd started as their second year project in the university which is about developing the concept of smart lockers.

Accordingly, Mr. Randika Viraj was appointed as the President for the new term. Next up was the appointment for the role of Vice President and Mr. Thushara Weerasundara was appointed for it. Subsequently, Mr. Imesh Balasuriya and Mr. Ridma Jayasundara were appointed for the roles of Secretary and Assistant Secretary respectively. Afterwards, Dr. Isuru Nawinne, a Senior Lecturer of the department, was assigned as the Senior Treasurer followed by the appointment of Mr. Nadeesha Diwakara as the Junior Treasurer. Then, Miss Nanduni Gamage and Miss Isara Tillekaratne were appointed for the roles of Editor and Junior Editor respectively. Finally, eight committee members were assigned representing the batches E16, E17, and E18 as follows; Mr. Kavindu Hewamanage, Mr. Deshan Liyanaarachchi, and Mr. Heshan Dissanayake, representing the E16 batch, Mr. Pubudu Bandara and Mr. Adithya Gallage representing the E17 batch and Mr. Ishta Jayakody, Miss Roshila Sewwandi and Mr. Ruchira Tharaka, representing the E18 batch.

After appointing the new members, Mr. Randika, the newly appointed president took a few moments to thank the past committee for their hard work. Also, he further added a brief introduction to the upcoming plans and asked for any opinions and suggestions regarding this endeavor. The latter part of the meeting comprised a discussion among the staff members and the students on the suggestions for the upcoming year. Prof. Roshan Ragel expressed his idea that the pandemic situation has brought forth the need for online events and that ACES could be at the forefront of organizing such events with novel concepts. It was highlighted that having two plans for the online mode as well as the physical mode could be beneficial to overcome the uncertainties and the AGM marked the conclusion with a bunch of experience-based advice and great congratulations to the new committee for the upcoming year.

ACES is looking forward to bring more creative and productive programs in the coming year and invites everyone to stay tuned.

Reported by Nanduni Gamage

Their aims are to make an impact on environmental conservation, to contribute towards United Nations Sustainable development goals three six nine and twelve, to give a sustainable alternative for sanitary needs in the market, to reduce the usage of polythene and plastics and to take a value out of banana stem which is thrown away after harvesting.

Plastic usage has been abused and adulterated by mankind, stepping towards the highest risks of pollution. The net increment of usage hasn’t been calculated for the year 2020, but undoubtedly an exponential rise can be predicted. Disposal and the 3R method seems to be in the air, but plastic landfill is the commonest problem well known, but solutions are not yet properly addressed by any responsible authority.

Due to the covid pandemic, the usage of sanitiser bottles increased drastically. If five million [which is less than twenty-five percent of the population] people discard one sanitiser bottle each per two weeks, the number of sanitiser bottles discarded per month is approximately ten million bottles. If so the total amount of plastic landfill added by sanitiser bottles per month equals the total number of bottles discarded into the mean weight of one bottle which eventually add up to around three hundred thousand kilograms of plastics per month only by sanitiser bottles.

They figured out this directly affected the usage of polythene and plastic in Sri Lanka. And to add to that normal bottle of sanitiser takes about four hundred and fifty to six hundred years to get decomposed, other than that there was no such biodegradable product in the market similar to this not only in Sri Lanka but in the global context as well.

The prototyped product was the first bottle model and sanitary wipe in the world, to be made out of a banana stem as the main ingredient. All these products have a net zero percent environmental impact, Which decomposes completely within one month. They chose banana paper over normal recycled paper, to address this environmental impact issue. Even recycled paper demands an additional cost of cutting trees, which is harmful to the prevailing situation of the country. They have aimed at minimal deforestation and carbon footprint in the production process.

Recently, bamboo came as a substitute for normal trees in China and East Asian countries. But in countries like Sri Lanka, bamboo cannot be used as a substitute ingredient for paper, as we don’t have considerable bamboo cultivation targeting production. Bamboo is highly resilient against soil erosion, especially in river beds. Banana has the same properties found in bamboo and is easily found in Sri Lanka. Add to that the fineness of a banana is better than bamboo (with an average fineness of two thousand four hundred Nano meters). Worldwide there is a good market for bamboo wipes due to their softness. Therefore banana would be better

The team emerged as the ideation champions in Thinkwave 2.0 organized by the University of Moratuwa, Overall runners up in Thinkwave 2.0, champions of Pera Inventra 2021 and second runners up of YES Youth Entrepreneurship Summit organized by the University of Sri Jayawaradenapura.

Their work has also being featured in local newspaper.

A paper co-authored by Gihan, titled “DeepLight: Robust & Unobtrusive Real-time Screen-Camera Communication for Real-World Displays” was accepted for IPSN 2021 (ACM/IEEE International Conference of Information Processing in Sensor Networks) which was held during 18-21 May 2021 in Nashville, Tennessee, USA. The conference had 105 submissions from all around the world and a 24% acceptance rate.

The team won the best artifact award at the conference. The award was introduced last year to encourage sharing of code/data and to promote the credibility of the community’s work. The evaluation criteria are (a) how well presented the code is and (2) the impact/potential of the contribution to the community/society.

Deeplight is a novel screen-to-camera communication (SCC) system developed to enable real-world situations. The generic idea of such systems is to encode messages in computer screens to be decoded by a camera system. The basic task is to make these encodings imperceptible (so a human using the screen would not be disturbed by the messages being transmitted for the camera). The task becomes non-trivial because the image processing algorithm has to be able to decode the imperceptible encoding. A wide range of algorithm and system design challenges are detailed in the publication.

This project was done by Vu Tran (when he was a PhD student/postdoc in Singapore Management University) and Gihan Jayatilaka (when he was an intern at SMU and a final year undergraduate in the University of Peradeniya) under the supervision of their advisers Prof. Ashwin Ashok (Georgia State University) and Prof. Archan Misra (Singapore Management University).

Related links:

DeepLight: Robust & Unobtrusive Real-time Screen-Camera Communication for Real-World Displays Vu Tran (Singapore Management University), Gihan Jayatilaka (University of Peradeniya), Ashwin Ashok (Georgia State University), Archan Misra (Singapore Management University)
https://doi.org/10.1145/3412382.3458269

https://larc-cmu-smu.github.io/deeplight/

https://ipsn.acm.org/2021/

https://ragelrg.medium.com/the-benefits-of-flipping-early-9ef2fbfd9a63

His talk is available on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w76SU16uqWo

The first seminar is planned to be on 10th of May 10.00- 11.00. Further details are at https://cepdnaclk.github.io/department-website-2021/computing-seminars.

We Congratulate Keshara Weerasinghe and Viraj Dhanushka for the recognition they have achieved. We are indeed proud of the extra step they have taken in representing the Department of Computer Engineering University of Peradeniya on such a national platform.

Keshara Weerasinghe has presented the Real-time Remote Covid-19 Patient Monitoring System built by himself and Kasun Vithanage (also from the Department of Computer Engineering) for the contest. This project was initiated as a solution for the huge risk the Medical professionals take in examining the COVID19 patients under isolation. We are proud of the effort taken by the two students in contributing from the best of their capabilities to the country during the hour of need. The Monitoring System built is currently functioning in National Hospital Kandy and Teaching Hospital Peradeniya. 

Viraj Dhanushka has presented the project titled, Digital Signage Based User Targeted Advertising. Here, they have embedded a user detecting and identifying unit within the digital signage system so that when a user is in front of a digital screen, the items advertised on the screen are relevant to the particular user. They have also implemented a digital signage control unit and a smart power supply unit in making the system more affordable and effective. This was built by Viraj Dhanushka, Hans Thisanke, Sumudu Liyanage from the Department of Computer Engineering, Ashan Serasinghe from the department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, and Akitha Madusanga from the Department of Civil Engineering. 

We once again congratulate Keshara Weerasinghe and Viraj Dhanushka for being innovative, going the extra mile in applying for national-level contests, and being an inspiration to other students.

Writeup by – Nithya Kularatne

For details go to https://cepdnaclk.github.io/department-website-2021/vacancies