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Marking a milestone in the National Best Quality Software Awards (NBQSA), 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 this year. Amani Soysa, also a student of IIT, was awarded the Bronze award for her Chord A Tune project.

The National Best Quality Software Awards (NBQSA) 2009, the 11th Annual NBQSA competition organized by BCS Sri Lanka in association with BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT, was held at Water’s Edge on 16th October, on a grand scale. NBQSA is the only national competition in Sri Lanka that recognizes and honours exceptional local ICT achievements and significant technological advancements in the country.

Lahiru and Amani 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 judging panel. Of 58 contestants, only 8 projects made it to the final round. Being one of only two individual projects in the final round, Lahiru and Amani truly deserve these awards for their outstanding skills.

The goal of Lahiru’s iDisplay is to identify a Computer Vision-Based Solution to Retrofit Existing Flat Displays into Interative Surfaces. Interactive interfaces provide novel ways of interaction by closely replicating the familiar hands-on experience of everyday object manipulation. Unfortunately, most of the currently available interactive surfaces are based on infrared sensing and projection that necessitates a considerable monetary investment and a higher level of engineering knowledge. iDisplay is a solution to overcome these problems in a novel way with minimal cost and engineering efforts. The hardware prototype of iDisplay includes a minimum number of hardware devices, a webcam and an LCD monitor.

The main sensing system is implemented using C++ on Microsoft Windows, with OpenCV as the main processing library. Lahiru has also included several Image Processing techniques such as background subtraction and skin colour detection to identify circular tangible objects and their colours. iDisplay can also integrate with existing multi-touch applications using TUIO, a standard protocol, to send touch events over a network link.

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. Around 250 lead sheets were used to train this system, using a data driven and heuristic approach. Furthermore, Chord A Tune opens a path for research into chord progression generation for vocals, taking into account the extraction of words, emotional factor and the tune from actual voice of the user.

Lahiru and Amani will also represent Sri Lanka at the Asia Pacific ICT Awards (APICTA), which is to be held in Melbourne, Australia from 14 to 17 December 2009.

The achievements of these students are an example of the strong foundation IIT builds for its students that enables them to achieve their goals. It also portrays the devotion of the staff who are constantly at hand to guide their students.