The first ever CSE Symposium was held in the department today. It was a nice opportunity for the students to present their project reports. The event started with the welcome speech by Madam Vishaka Nanayakkara, Head, CSE. The key note speech was delivered by Mr. Dinesh Saparamadu,CEO, hSenid Group of Companies. It was a very interesting speech. Mr.Dinesh talked about the emerging technologies and how we can reach there. The technologies includes Cloud Computing, Mobile Computing , Social Media and more. There were many good thoughts for students in his speech. One such thought from him:Follow what you love to do and money will follow you.
The were fourteen paper presentations on various topics. All of the projects and presentations were very much interesting except mine :( . It was really cool to see my friends solving real world problems and giving very useful additions to the open source world. The first presentation was on Yahoo! Mail Informer, a chrome extension by Hasitha. It displays a pop-up when a new mail has arrived to your Yahoo! Mail box. It’s really handy for everyone. Next was a SeaMonkey currency conversion extension- XChange, by Dilmi, which does the currency conversions on web pages using Yahoo! Finances. Then Isira presented his project - A Tool on Moodle to Select the Students for Limited Size Classes Using Multiple Selection Criterions – a bidding process to choose modules. Then it was my presentation on SmartECards, a Joomla! component. It was followed by the presentation by Dilina, EasyFind- Support for Time-Line Course Format of the Moodle. There after Chamendri presented her project -Sinhala Spell Checker for OpenOffice.
The second session was started with a presentation on EasySinhala and EasyTamil real time Transliteration add-ons for Mozilla Firefox, by Suhothayan. It was followed by Isuru Udana on qsFOX – Quick Sinhala for Firefox. Then Isuru Haththotuwa presented EasyChat : An Easy Way to Use an Instant Messaging Client, an addition for SIP Communicator. It was really cool with many user friendly features. Pavithra presented her project -FoxAlert Extension for Mozilla Firefox Web Browser. It pops up alerts about natural disasters to the users. ChatCrypt: Chat Encryption System for Google Chrome was presented by Maninda. This extension is very useful for those who want to have higher privacy during online communication. Then Pivithuru presented her project Ooo Sinhalese Translator for OpenOffice. It uses a dictionary to translate word by word. Next Thilanka Kaushalya presented the project on extending the Sahana OCR project for automating the reading process of hand written forms. It uses the Tesseract open source OCR. The final presentation was by Keheliya on SiyaBasScript - Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome Extension for converting web sites with non-Unicode Sinhala fonts to Unicode. It’s a very useful one which gives freedom for users to view web pages in any browser they want.
The whole event was a great success and I am sure that this is a great start for top quality symposiums in the coming years. It was a day to learn about many new things including different technologies. In short – A good learning experience!
