KICACT 2017

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://repository.kln.ac.lk/handle/123456789/17369

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V-Synch: Rendering Distance a No-issue with the New Feature of Video Synchronization in Existing Multimedia Platforms.
(Faculty of Computing and Technology, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka., 2017) Tiwari, R.; Shakya, S.
Social media are computer mediated technologies that allow creating and sharing of information idea, career interests and other forms of expression via communities and networks. They introduce substantial and pervasive changes to communication between businesses, organizations, communities and individuals. Various features are being introduced in this field with the objective to make it more attractive to users. “V-Synch” is aimed at introducing features like video and sketch pad synchronization to develop a full- fledged app that also has the current popular features like internet call and chat. We intend to make an android application in which users can always stay connected through multiple platform synchronization (watch the video and use sketch pad in synchronized way in real time) although they are distance apart. All the devices connected to the group can take control of video playback. When any user of that group starts, pauses, or performs specific action on a video, the state of that video is synchronized to all other connected devices in real time. The elements drawn on sketch pad are also shown live in real time to everyone connected to the group. NTP algorithm is used to synchronize all participating devices to within a few milliseconds of Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). The synchronization is correct when both the incoming and outgoing routes between the client and the server have symmetrical nominal delay. V-Synch could be very much beneficial to students for group study, long distance friends to hang out together and Serve a great deal in case of tele-education.
Four Legged Walking Robot with Smart Gravitational Stabilization
(Faculty of Computing and Technology, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka., 2017) Anthony, A.S.; Pallewatta, A.P.
There are many dangerous jobs which could be safely replaced with an adequately designed robot: bomb disposal; construction in high rise buildings; examination of radioactive environments and combat oriented police/military operations. A machine must then achieve a level of dexterity and reliability greater than that of a human worker. One of the most versatile dynamic robots that can be seen today was made by Boston Dynamics: the quadruped robot named Spot Mini is capable of handling objects, climbing stairs and operating in an office, home or outdoor environment (Bostondynamics.com, 2017). One of the main shortcomings of such robots are their size, cost and inherent need for power. Additionally, a dog inspired gait structure is not optimal for climbing. The aim addressed in this study was to design a robot that would be inconspicuous, capable of maneuvering through small environments and be able to climb inclined surfaces with minimum processing power and cost. To this end, the robot was programmed with an insect inspired gait mechanism for maximum surface area while climbing and a novel ability to maintain the center of gravity by leg movements as shown in figure 1A. Table 1 shows a direct comparison of mobility between the finished robot and an average human being. It would either walk or stabilize once instructed via Bluetooth. The newfangled placement of legs ensured bipod gait during locomotion for faster and efficient motion and monopod gait during the stabilization phase for agility. The desired positions were calculated by the use of inverse kinematics and data from the IMU. The finalized robot was able to successfully walk and proceed through various terrain including grass, sand, small stones and miscellaneous household objects such as books, bags, pencils etc. The auto balancing function worked for as steep an angle as 55°.
The Impact of a Security Culture in Small and Medium Scale Enterprise (SME) on Enterprise Information Security
(Faculty of Computing and Technology, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka., 2017) Pathirana, H.P.A.I.; Karunathilaka, J.A.M.A.
An information system is much more than computer hardware; it is the entire set of software, hardware, data, people, procedures, and networks that make possible the use of information resources in the enterprise. In current world, the information is stored in the computerised system in the form of digital data, including sensitive data, which can be extracted as needed. It is much better than maintaining hard copies in traditional manner by using physical storages. The information system security is crucially important for a business with that background. The SME introduces in many forms. Many use the number of employees, capital amount invested, turnover amount, and nature of business. In Sri Lanka, main banks use value of fixed assets as a way to introduce SME, whereas the World Bank uses number of employees as the criteria. Even though enterprises are relatively small and run with a limited budget, SMEs can now target national and international market segments, enabled by the Internet. Therefore, this complicated the business process at SMEs. The computer security represents confidentiality, integrity and availability (CIA) from the mainframe-computing era. The rise of the Internet and complex computer systems means that data is now decentralized. As such, the security measures now must extend form the CIA domain to cover additional areas, depicted in the McCumber Cube in three dimensions. This challenges SME’s to assure information security with a limited operating budget, and there are two approaches presented by the ‘Sphere of Protection’, focusing on both technology and people aspects. The technological aspect is expensive, whereas the people aspect is cost effective by introducing security culture. The policy implementation is the better tool for security culture by considering business in process level emphasizing laws to acknowledge people on the importance of assuring secure environment, and education and training are important to share the knowledge among employee. This paper explores the need for effective people based security measures for better security culture, before the implementation of technological controls is considered for SMEs.
Challenges in Implementing ERP Systems in Small Medium Manufacturing Companies in Sri Lanka
(Faculty of Computing and Technology, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka., 2017) Yasotha, R.; Ramramanan, L.
There are numerous information systems available in the market to be selected for implementation in manufacturing organizations. When many information systems manually intergraded for management reporting for a company, there are high risks for accuracy of information. ERP is one of the information systems with inbuilt capacity to integrate many parts of the functional areas that provides meaningful information to the management. This paper describes the experiences on how a small medium size growing roof manufacturing company in Sri Lanka problem and then overcome in implementing ERP system. Small medium size manufacturing companies in Sri Lanka do not normally have electronic information system in all part of business process, whereas some processes such as production process operates outside the information system. Therefore, it is very important to predefine what level of integration to be done, who are the related parties to be consulted and what level of management information is required. The success of ERP implementation is partially depending on the selection of suitable ERP system compatible with company business process and the capability of implementation partner to map those standardized business processes into ERP by conducting BPR. This manufacturing company has many automated manufacturing plants with Programmable Logic Controllers (PLC) versions from year 1960 to 2013. When these PLCs try to integrate into ERP system, there are so many problems faced by the company that leads up to modification of plant. Finally, company decided to implement ERP by postponing the PLC integration. Well tested bugs free less customized SAP B1 system has been implemented to the company by monitoring progress by several log books. The big bang approach has been followed to implement the SAP B1 system with short term parallel run of legacy system. More importantly, top management support and motivation on change management has fuelled up the success of the SAP B1 implementation. This paper reveals the experience gained during the planning to implementation stages of SAP B1 that may occur in small medium manufacturing companies in Sri Lanka.
Artificial Neural Network based Emotions Recognition System for Tamil Speech.
(Faculty of Computing and Technology, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka., 2017) Paranthaman, D.; Thirukumaran, S.
Emotion has become the important part in communication between human and machine, so the detection of emotions has become important part in pattern recognition through Artificial Neural Network (ANN). Human's emotions can be detected based on the physiological measurements, facial expressions and speech. Since human shows different expressions for a particular emotion when they are speaking therefore the emotions can be quantified. The English speech dataset is provided with descriptions of each emotional context available in Emotional Prosody Speech and Transcripts in the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC). The main objective of this project describes the ANN based approach for Tamil speech emotions recognition by analyzing four basic emotions sad, angry, happy and neutral using the mid-term features. Tamil speeches are recorded with four emotions by males and females using the software “Cubase”. The time duration is set to three seconds with the sampling frequency of 44.1 kHz as it is the logical and default choice for most digital audio material. For the simulations, these recorded speech samples are categorized into different datasets and 40 samples are included in each dataset. Preprocessing includes sampling, normalization and segmentation and is performed on the speech signals. In the sampling process the analog signals are converted into digital signals then each speech sentence is normalized to ensure that all the sentences are in the same volume range. Next, the signals are separated into frames in the segmentation process. Then, the mid-term features such as speech rate, energy, pitch and Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC) are extracted from the speech signals. Mean and Variance values are calculated from the extracted features. To create the classifier for the emotions, the above statistical results as an input matrix with their related emotions-target matrix are fed to train, validate and test. The neural network back propagation algorithm is executed by the classifier to recognize completely new samples of Tamil speech datasets. Each of the datasets consists of different combinations of speech sentences with different emotions. Then, the new speech samples are assigned to identify the recognition rate of the speech emotions using the confusion matrix. In conclusion, the selected mid-term features of Tamil speech signals classify the four emotions with the overall accuracy of 83.45%. Thus, the mid-term features selected are proven to be the good representations of emotions for Tamil speech signals and correctly recognize the Tamil speech emotions using ANN. The input gathered by a group of experienced drama artists who have the voice with the good emotional feelings would help to increase the accuracy of the dataset.
Automated Characters Recognition and Family Relationship Extraction.
(Faculty of Computing and Technology, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka., 2017) Bajracharya, A.; Shrestha, S.; Upadhyaya, S.; Shrawan, B.K.; Shakya, S.
“Automated characters recognition and family relationship extraction” is an application of Natural Language Processing to identify characters from the story and determine the family relationship among them. This application is the use of specialized computer programs to identify entities, classify them and extract characters from them and determine relationship between them. This paper follows basic steps of NLP i.e. Tokenization, POS tagging, sentence parsing followed by the pronoun resolution implementing various algorithms and finally extracting entities and relations among them. Heretofore, we have successfully resolved pronoun from simple sentences by resolving Noun Phrase using the recursive algorithm for tree generation and hence extracting relation between the Noun Phrase (NP). Basic approach towards this project is to do Tokenization and POS tagging first. Then, sentence which is recursive composition of Noun phrase, verb phrase and prepositional phrase is parsed and recursive tree is generated. Then tree is traversed to determine the noun phrase which is replaced by the entity object of that particular noun phrase. Pronoun resolution is the essence of NLP and is of different type. Here, Co reference resolution has been used. After resolving the entire pronoun, then finally relationship is extracted from the story by comparing the relation ID of each Entity. Given the simple story, entities are being extracted and relationship is also determined. Understanding the approach of NLP and implementing them to showcase its use is the main theme of this project which is being done with as accurate result as possible. This paper can act as a base.
De-Identification for Privacy Protection in Audio Contents
(Faculty of Computing and Technology, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka., 2017) Induruwa, K.G.; Pallewatta, A.P.
Among different forms of audio data or information, the author wishes to limit the scope of this research to privacy protection in voice contents of speakers, because voice generally conveys intelligence such as gender, emotion and it differs from speaker to speaker. De-identification of voice may bring numerous advantages, such as preserving the privacy of speakers during communication, maintaining confidentiality of inquirers who conduct critical investigations and improve the clarity of voice signals used in airport/aviation communication by standardizing the voices of Pilots and Air Traffic Controllers. Though advanced voice encryption methods are available to deteriorate the intelligence of speech, they do not directly address the issues of speaker de-identification. This research project aims at de-identification of voice signals while preserving the intelligence of the speech during communication. Designed GUI for mono LPC spectrums of original and de-identified voice signals In this project, the de-identification process was done at three stages, where the last two processes are irreversible. First, in the frequency normalization stage, pitch of the original signal is changed and slightly de-identified the voice in frequency domain. Then 12 LPC (Linear Predictive Coding) co-efficient values of the subject-person’s original voice signal is subtracted from the 12 coefficient values of the reference sample voice signal. As a result, features are slightly moderated by the second stage. In the third stage the features are destroyed again by shuffling LPC coefficients randomly within three categories. Therefore, this whole process is expected to preserve a higher level of privacy. Based on the test carried out by using 15 samples of male and 15 samples of female voice produced a degree of 10% and 20% de-identification, which could be accepted as a very satisfactory result.
Improvement of Rubber to Steel Adhesion in Press-on Solid Tyres by Varying the NR/BR Ratio in the NR/BR Composite Bonding Layer.
(Faculty of Computing and Technology, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka., 2017) Weerakoon, A.D.; Jayawarna, J.C.
Press-on solid tyres are typically made from a tread compound and a bonding layer as a composite on to the pretreated and adhesive (primer and cement) coated steel band. The so called intermediate bonding layer is a NR/BR composite. A significant problem in solid tyres is the loss of adhesion between steel and rubber with time. This limits the ultimate useful lifetime of the reinforcement and hence, of tires. This research was focused to investigate the improvement of the rubber to steel adhesion by varying the NR/BR ratio in the NR/BR composite bonding layer. In 1984 M.G. Huson et.al reported, even though NR and BR are differing little in either polarity or degree of unsaturation NR/BR blends have been shown to suffer uneven crosslink distributions in Sulphur vulcanizates and effects the physico-mechanical properties of the NR/BR blends. D. Freitas (2003) showed in preparation of NR/BR rubber blends, the addition sequence with which the components of the formulation are mixed does have influence on the behavior of the final material. Fluctuation of the prices of NR and BR in the market also significantly affect to the cost of NR/BR composite. In this study, NR/BR composites were prepared by varying the NR/BR ratio from 100/0, 90/10, 80/20, 70/30, 60/40, 50/50, 40/60, 30/70, 20/80, 10/90 and 0/100. Curing characteristics and the physico-mechanical properties including the adhesion value were measured in each prepared NR/BR composites. The best adhesion value obtained with the 50/50 NR/BR composite and it was 25.61 KN/m and that was in the excellent level according to the figures given for levels of adhesion for rubber to metal in ISO 813 peel test. The best tensile strength, hardness and the rebound resilience values also obtained from the 50/50 NR/BR composites and those values were 22.6 MPa, 63 IRHD and 55%. These properties together with cure characteristics and the ageing properties also were the best in the 50/50 NR/BR composite. Adhesion values were higher than the adhesion value obtained from the currently utilizing NR/BR composite. The results further concluded that the so called properties including rubber to steel adhesion properties obtained from 50/50 NR/BR composite is better than the currently existing NR/BR composite which is with 70/30 NR/BR ratio.
5G Wireless Communication over Heterogeneous Networks: Solutions for Hardware and Software Fallacies.
(Faculty of Computing and Technology, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka., 2017) Abeysinghe, A.
Proliferating use of mobile communications have urged the need to develop networks able to cater to higher bandwidth, speeds and support a plethora of upcoming technologies. Introduction of 5G networks in a heterogeneous network architecture has been chosen as a viable solution to persistent issues in current implementations. However, these network designs lack several fundamental software and hardware pitfalls associated with problems in designing: associated cell optimizations, schemes on simultaneous base station associations and cooperation between tiers in the architecture. Therefore, this research will focus in fine tuning these software and hardware fallacies for the successful implementation of proposed 5G networks. A main software drawback in current networks is persistence of lazy caching themes. As shown in figure 1, currently user requests are often matched to arbitrary locations without the use of preenabled caching mechanisms. To overcome this issue proactive caching where base stations (BS) identify external clients possessing cached information and dynamic Device-to-Device (D2D) connection creation could be implemented. As shown in figure 2, significant improvements in successful requests could be achieved both under high load and under low load as users are efficiently matched to potential targets. A main drawback in mobile network hardware design is high energy consumption proportional to increasing user requests. To overcome this issue cell zooming could be introduced to 5G implementations. As shown in figure 3, the central cell could use an algorithmic approach to identify the network request density around it and zoom its range in or out to efficiently serve while neighboring cells could be switched off for a predetermined interval and vice versa. T-tests carried under this paradigm proved that significant cost savings in efficient use of energy in these cells could be achieved under this solution
Dynamic Human Workflow handling by PL/SQL.
(Faculty of Computing and Technology, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka., 2017) Ranasinghe, A.N.; Dasanayaka, D.M.N.K.
Human task assignment is a predominant operation in organizational problem-solving process which can rapidly change from situation to situation. Current workflow handling systems are lessadaptable and less-customizable regardless of whether the workflows are manual or automated. This study introduces a series of algorithms written in SQL to handle human task workflows by executing XML based objects. The given solution consists of entity objects which can either be a single person or a group of people. The two types of entity objects were connected to each other by the relationships. The relationships from one entity to another entity will hold the actions that the first entity can perform. Based on the action taken by one entity will decide the proceeding path of the workflow. These entity objects consist with a property called status which can be true, false, or null which represents whether it is available for the execution or not. SQL scripts were developed to handle the workflow components written in XML format which will provide a better opportunity to gather information of each entity and relationship objects through Graphical User Interfaces. As the first step of the SQL script, it will convert the XML data into a SQL table format which provide a better way to handle the information gathered. Backward Process is used whenever a component is being executed, previous components from that level will be checked for status values and it will set status false whenever finds a component without any status value. This process will prevent the execution of unwanted branches of the workflow and speedup the execution process because only the components with true or null as the status value will be considered in the execution time. Reset Workflow is used to reset status values of the objects from directed object onwards when the path of the workflow directs to a previous level of the workflow. It will make sure that previously taken actions will not effect on the next execution cycle. Execute an Action method will handle the actions taken corresponding to a certain object. It will decide the proceeding path of the workflow hierarchy according the action taken. Then it invokes the “execute next component” method to move along in the selected path. Execute next component method will check all the other objects related to the object which used to invoke the method. It will execute all the logical operations based on the action taken by an entity in order to decide the proceeding path of the workflow. Method given in the study was tested by integrating to an existing system where it showed the capability of executing complex workflows accurately. Contrary to manual workflow engine, this architecture is efficient and effective in business process as it can increase the performance of organizational workflow allocation. Instead of using a separate application, this solution can be integrated with an existing system since it is very adaptable and customizable. Approach to handle scheduled tasks can be identified as a major future aspect for the study where the performance can also be improved in future.
Android Shopping Cart Application (ASCA)
(Faculty of Computing and Technology, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka., 2017) Bandara, K.; Wijegunasekara, M.C.
Due to the busy lifestyle of people in today’s society it has become more convenient for them to buy all their daily shopping items in one place. Therefore, shopping grocery items in a supermarket has become a common activity in Sri Lanka too. The major problems faced by customers when shopping grocery items in a supermarket, is the effort they have to put and the time consuming tasks to be faced almost every day during shopping. One such difficulty is the need of frequently visiting the supermarket in order to buy day-to-day items. Also when buying the goods, most of the time, a walk around the shop to select the necessary products is an inevitable task. Even after buying, they need to stand in long queues at the counters to do the payments. Therefore, using the modern technology to build a suitable system to solve such problems is valuable. Mainly there are two approaches to solve this problem. First is a web shopping cart application and the other is a mobile application. Today as most of the people always carry smart phones with them, nowadays every business requires to have its own business application for mobile users. This research project has two major parts: the mobile application and the website which acts as a content management system. Using this mobile application, the customers are given the facility to buy online or to get the products delivered to their home by the delivery service provided from the shop or else they can send the order confirmation and get the ordered items by payments done at the shop. This mobile application is being developed using the Android Studio Software. The client side of the application is designed as a website, for the supermarket owners to manage the online database which stores the content for the mobile application. In order to measure the effectiveness of the implementation of this project, questionnaires were distributed to a total population of 50 people who buy their daily groceries in a supermarket and having an android smart phone. With the analysis of data, 32% of the people strongly agreed and 48% agreed that traditional shopping will be superseded with online shopping in near future and only 6% has disagreed the above idea. Half of the population agreed and 16% strongly agreed the fact that only credit card holders being able to buy products online is a major drawback in a shopping cart application. As future enhancements, the application will be developed to run on any type of mobile operating system other than just android. Currently only the bank portal and a link to connect with Paypal is designed and the payment gateway is to be developed further. The client side can also be created as a mobile application. In conclusion, the result of this research project is a user friendly mobile application which runs on Android Operating System and a Content Management System has developed as a Website to interact with the Database. The ASCA was a success in developing an online mobile shopping cart which could satisfy the current problems of customers who buy their daily grocery items in a supermarket.
Recognising Elders using Behavioural Biometrics
(Faculty of Computing and Technology, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka., 2017) Preethiraj, R.; Sarveswaran, K.
The elderly population continues to grow everywhere and it finds difficulties to access websites due to various reasons including functional impairments like lack in vision, hearing, mobility and movement. Therefore, websites are usually made separately for elders to improve their user experience. However, first it’s important to recognise whether a user is an elder or not, and for that usually user profile information such as date of birth or age are used. Users may reluctant to feed information or may even feed a wrong one. This research proposes a method using which elders can automatically be recognised using behavioural biometrics of them. Based on the initial observational study on elders it was noted that elders shake the mouse to identify the mouse pointer location, do scrolling fast without much control, and the elders take a lot of time to click on a link or button after moving over it. These three observation were considered as behavioural biometrics to recognise elders. A data set was compiled in a control environment from 24 people of different ages including 18 elders who are more than age of 65. All the people were asked to follow a same set of tasks in two websites. Thereafter, the collected data were cleaned and a decision tree was built to recognise elders using j48 algorithm and Weka tool. The results showed that elders move the mouse faster than 5.7928 pixel/millisecond, scroll faster than 3.455561/millisecond, and take more than 1, 158.6875 milliseconds to respond over a link or button. Thereafter more behavioural biometrics were collected from random users in open environment in which users were asked to fill a questionnaire with the intention of collecting their age. The collected data then were used to validate the decision tree. It was found that speed of mouse movement recognises the elders with 84.51% accuracy, scrolling speed recognises with 96.08% accuracy, and response time recognises elders with accuracy of 97.68%. The results show that instead of rely on user profiles, elders can be recognised using user behavioural biometrics with significant accuracy. Though the response time shows a high recognition rate, it is planned to explore the combination of different behaviour biometrics together to see whether recognition rate can be improved.
Automated Financial Management System with an Android Application.
(Faculty of Computing and Technology, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka., 2017) Gunathilaka, M.D.T.; Weerakoon, W.A.C.
A financial company who offers both daily and monthly loans to their customers had to increase their functionality in an efficient manner to full fill the higher demand. The solution was to introduce an automated financial management system to their company by automating their manual process. The main objective of this project was to develop a main system with an android application to use in the company. The main system included the features to input, edit, update, and store the details such as customer, collector, package and loan. Further, it was required to send massages to collectors’ smart phone or Tab, update the system database using incoming massages form collectors’ smart phone or Tab, and generate reports. The android application includes features to manage a database in smart phone or Tab, update device database using incoming messages from the main system, send messages to update the system database and generate an invoice through a Bluetooth printer. Therefore, there were two parts in this project. The first part was to design and construct the main system, which was located in the head office. This was implemented using Java Standard Edition. By using the main system, owner or manager can handle the activities done inside the office. When a loan was issued to a customer, the particular details are stored in the main system and send to the mobile phone of the field collector via SMS using a GSM modem. Further, the details received via SMS to the modem from field collectors are used to update the MySQL system database. The second part was to build the android application using Dalvik Virtual Machine on Linux Kernel to use in field collectors’ mobile phone. Furthermore, the application is automatically updated with the details received from the main system located in the head office. While field collectors are collecting loans, they can access the details through the application and they can print an invoice using a Bluetooth printer to issue for the customer. Further, the collection details are stored in the device and are sent to the main system via SMS. The two parts were connected through a mobile network. Since, they have to use this android application in the areas with lower or no internet facilities, online solutions could not be provided. Although, the internet facility is not available, the main system and the application can be upgraded with software agents using JADE or JaCa like platforms. Further, system testing was conducted by the colleagues using about 100 test cases. In addition to that, the customer acceptance testing was conducted according to the criteria defined by the company. Hence, it was able to prove the completeness and the functionality of the entire system. Finally, with the automated system, they were able to improve the performance of the company by saving the human and physical resources and removing the unnecessary queues in the head office.
Virtual Learning – A Popular Learning Method Among Students.
(Faculty of Computing and Technology, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka., 2017) Abeysinghe, A.
A virtual learning environment (VLE) or e-learning is a popular method of learning at present. But VLE depends on student acceptance of such kind of programs; if they prefer e-learning or classroom learning. Though VLE could save time, cost, space and motivate students to learn in a new dilemma, VLE poses several drawbacks in addition to those experienced by traditional methods of learning. These include difficulties in adapting to this system of learning, lack of computer literacy, lack of student motivation as well as technical issues. This trend is prominent, especially in developing countries where students are still in the process of adapting to a web and mobile app-based culture of learning. Also, students in developing countries often face problems of low speed Internet as well as lack of Internet access. Therefore, this research focuses on how switching from a traditional culture to an Internet-based culture could be achieved and how distance learning could be promoted in the distant world thus minimizing the digital divide. This research focused on solving these issues under four main themes: providing foundation on how websites and mobile apps could be used, providing streaming and caching facilities for slow Internet connections, creating surveys among students from different demographic, ethnic and geographic backgrounds and designing courses appropriately and ensuring multilingual course availability. According to the research, it was found that these solutions could be achieved in the near future with the advancement of the Internet and new technologies in developing countries. As such, it was inferred that virtual learning could be promoted as a learning method among students in developing countries.
Online Train Ticket Reservation System.
(Faculty of Computing and Technology, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka., 2017) Siriweera, U.G.S.M.; Dias, N.G.J.
Railway is one of the most important means of transportation, and plays a vital role in the transport industry. With such a huge customer base, purchasing train tickets has been a very prominent problem. Railway E-Ticketing systems have been developed with the acceleration of technology but, they are not economically viable as mobile applications. After considering the above facts, “Sri Lankan Railway (SLR)” has been developed as a mobile application for making online reservations and accessing relevant information across different locations via are Internet. In SLR Application, user should create an account as first time and then can make a reservation by adding the train details. As soon as the payment is done, reference number is generated on the application. While this is convenient for most people, it has made things particularly easier for people residing in remote areas. It is much easier than standing in long queues. So they can book tickets with a tap and they can check available train for required date and time, which seats are already booked in relevant compartment and which are the seats available for booking. They can graphically see those details. The system has a separate application called checker application (SLRCS) for validation of ticket. Since Checking application it saves a huge work of the ticket checkers for validation of tickets by moving from manual ticket checking process to digital ticket checking process. This is done by just scanning with their own android mobile to validate the ticket. Using this application, Railway department’s employees can log on to checkers account and the system verifies the ticket reservation by comparing generated reference number. Further the android and cloud based technologies have been used for the development process of the both applications. The SLR application was a success in developing an online mobile ticket booking which could satisfy the current problems of passengers who reserve tickets. The testing process has been successfully done by reviewing users in different backgrounds. An application for managing server side can be proposed to further enhancement for the project. In order to manage the database as the admin, it can provide a dashboard. In current application, the database updates manually. Need to focus on a way of letting it to be updated automatically. And a payment gateway should have to apply for the implementation stage. The developed SLR application will contribute for a positive impact in the business economy in Sri Lanka. Hopefully, it will be beneficial for all the users who travel in trains and it will make their lives easier.
Facilitating an E-Learning Platform Beyond the Lectures: Digital Natives Become Active Learners.
(Faculty of Computing and Technology, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka., 2017) Weerakoon, A.D.
The traditional lecturing can't inspire the digital natives towards the engagement in active learning to succeed them in the university environment and beyond in the real world context. In 2004, Romiszowski declared that e-learning presents an entirely new learning environment for students, thus requiring a different skill set to be successful. In 2008, Markus stated that e-learning is a learning process created by interaction with digitally delivered content, network-based services and tutoring support. E-learning is also called web-based learning, online learning, distributed learning, computer assisted learning, or internet based learning. This study was focused to explore the impact of a poster exhibition project on the active learning of digital natives by providing an e-learning environment. This study was carried out with Level 2 Polymer Engineering Technology students and four consecutive annual poster exhibitions has been conducted with four different batches. Each poster exhibition project was a one-month project. The students were grouped into 12 teams of 2 students in each group and each group had to prepare one poster after finalizing a theme for the poster exhibition project and the topics for the individual posters. The theme and the topics were selected to cover more than the 75% of the syllabus content of DPT 207 Polymeric Materials subject. In preparation of the posters, each group had to write a report in prior to create the rough skeletons for the poster by referring relevant articles including journal articles through the internet and each group was asked to email that report to the researcher before the given deadline. Through the constructive feedback the students had to modify the rough skeletons several times and finally came up with amazing posters. At the end of the poster exhibition project the students were given a questionnaire with both open-ended and close-ended questions. Descriptive statistical results reveal the facilitation of e-learning helps the students to learn actively, motivationally and to enhance self-monitored learning along with the collaborative learning. By enabling learners to be more active participants, a well-designed-e-learning experience can motivate them to become more engaged with the subject content and further develop them as lifelong learners.
Applying Intelligent Speed Adaptation to a Road Safety Mobile Application –DriverSafeMode
(Faculty of Computing and Technology, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka., 2017) Perera, W.S.C.; Dias, N.G.J.
During the last decades, Sri Lanka has experienced a highly accelerated growth level of motorized transportation with the rapid urbanization due to the economic development. However, the increasing motorization has also placed a significant burden on people’s health in the form of uncontrollable growth rate of road accidents and fatalities. We have focused on excess speed and mobile distraction which are two major factors that have caused majority of road accidents. Exceeding the speed limit, which is enforced under the traffic law, increases both the risk of a road crash as well as the severity of the injuries by reducing the ability to judge the forthcoming events. Use of mobile phones distracts a driver in the means of visual, physical and cognitive. These factors are largely preventable but are unlikely; due to the lack of adequate mechanisms in existing road safety plans in Sri Lanka. Especially in rural areas, roads are poorly maintained which has led to faded, hidden, foliage obscured speed limit signs and absence of appropriate signs at vulnerable locations (schools, hospitals). Existing plans also lack alert systems to avoid drivers from using phones while driving. Proposed application uses Advisory Intelligent Speed Adaptation (ISA) to ensure drivers' compliance with legally enforced speed limits by informing the driver on vehicle speed along with speed limits and giving feedback. There exist many ISA systems deployed using various methods such as GPS, Transponders, compasses, speed sensors and map matching, based on native traffic infrastructures of other countries. Google Fused location provider API web service was used combined with GPS sensor of the smartphone to obtain continuous geo location points (latitude, longitude). Distance between two location points was calculated using Haversine Algorithm. Using the distance and time spent between two location updates, vehicle speed was calculated. Google Maps Geocoding API was used to obtain the type of road on which the driver is driving. Accepted speed limits were stored in a cloud hosted database according to each road type and vehicle type. Application establishes a connection to the database to gain the accepted speed limit whenever a new road type is detected. It compares real-time speed Vs speed limit and initiate audio and visual alerts when the vehicle speed exceeds the limit. Google Places API was used to identify schools and hospitals within 100m and informs the driver using audio and visual alerts. Application uses in-built GSM service to reject incoming calls and in-built notification service to mute distracting notifications. A test trial was carried out to evaluate the accuracy of speed detection. Mean speed of the test vehicle speedometer was 14.4122kmph (Standard Deviation=14.85891) and that of the application was 13.7488kmph (Standard Deviation=14.31279). An independent-sample t-test proved that the speed values of the test vehicle and the application are not significantly different at 5% level of significance. User experiences of 30 randomly selected test drivers were evaluated. 80% of lightmotor vehicle test drivers had stated that the application is very effective. 10% of the heavy-motor vehicle drivers and 20% of tricycle test drivers had found it difficult to perceive the audio alerts due to the noisy surrounding. Evaluations prove that the usage of the proposed system can impose a direct and positive effect on the road safety of Sri Lanka as expected.
Stock Market Analysis and Prediction.
(Faculty of Computing and Technology, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka., 2017) Shakya, A.; Pokhrel, A.; Bhattarai, A.; Sitikhu, P.; Shakya, S.
Stock price and stock index price forecasting system, used by investors and financial managers to describe the market and compare the return on specific investments, has been a topic of research for very long now. When in the stock market, there are more buyers than there are sellers, the price must adapt or no trades are made. This tends to drive the price upwards, increasing the market quotation at which investors can sell their shares, enticing investors who had previously not been interested in selling and vice versa. These demands and supplies are ever changing, resulting in highly-fluctuating, non-linear stock prices which poses a threat against the credibility of those prediction systems which only view the market from one perspective. For a reliable system, it is therefore important to explore the market on multiple grounds, basically through Technical, Fundamental and News Analysis. Under Technical Analysis, SMA (Simple Moving Average) is used as a preliminary data smoothing technique, which helps reduce the fluctuations substantially. Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) is then employed to analyze the nonlinear relationships between the stock closed price and various technical indexes, and to capture the knowledge of trading signals that are hidden in historical data. Features like traded share, traded volume, opening price, closing price, high price and low price are fed as an input parameter in Neural Network. Backpropagation algorithm is then implemented to train the given Network model. The neural network layers and neuron numbers in hidden layers are then tuned by training and validating the data set iteratively. The fundamental analysis involves thorough study of financial statements of companies, also known as quantitative analysis. This involves looking at assets, liabilities, revenue, expenses and all other financial aspects of a company. It gives insight on the company's future performance. The results moreover reflect the company's success or failure over the long term than immediate future. Hence, unlike technical analysis, it helps predicting stock price on a long run. In news analysis, we focus on understanding the news sentiment and its affects which may cause the investors to either buy or sell the shares based on positivity or negativity of the news. The news analysis problem can be mapped into similarity based classification. A set of vectors are created from analysis of historical news, where each component of a vector represents the features in data set. The required labeling are done based on historical rise/fall of stock prices. The increase or decrease of the trend is then predicted based on similarity measures. In short, news analysis predicts the price of share of the following day by comparing the most recent news with past news using Knearest neighbor algorithm. Thus, through the circumstantial application of the above-mentioned analysis, the paper proposes to predict the stock market in a more generalized manner.
Design and Development of a Dashboard for a Real-Time Anomaly Detection System.
(Faculty of Computing and Technology, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka., 2017) Korala, H.C.; Weerasooriya, G.N.R.; Udantha, M.; Dias, G.
Web logs contain a wealth of undiscovered information on user activities and if analyzed in a proper way they can be utilized for many purposes. Identifying malicious attacks and having a daily summary on user activities are some valuable information that can be extracted from these log files. At present, many tools and algorithms have been developed to extract information from these log files but on most occasions, they have failed to present this information to the user to make decisions in real-time. This paper presents a novel approach taken to design and develop a dashboard for a real-time anomaly detection system with the use of some open source tools to process complex events in real-time, batch process stored data using big data tools and dashboard development techniques. The system accepts web log files as the input; first they are cleaned by a preprocessing unit and then published to WSO2’s complex event processor as events to identify and filter out special patterns and summarised by using a set of user specified rules. If an anomaly is detected, an alert or warning will be displayed on the widget based dashboard in real time. Furthermore, each and every event stream that comes to the CEP will be forwarded to WSO2’s Data Analytic Server via 'Thrift' protocol. That data will be saved in a Cassandra big data database for further batch processing which is used for drill down purposes. A widget based Dashboard has been developed with the use of modern dashboard concepts and web technologies to display information such as daily summary, possible security breaches in an interactive way allowing system administrators to make operational decisions then and there based on the information provided. Moreover, users can drill down and analyze the historical security breach information and also can customize the dashboard according to their preference. The evaluation techniques used fall under the criteria of evaluation against well-established standards and evaluation by external expert review. Evaluation for security standards has done against the security standard set by the PCI security standards council and evaluation for dashboard has been carried out against the dashboard standards defined by Oracle which describes about the best practices in developing an effective dashboard. Evaluation by external expert review was done in line with the people who have prior experience in dealing with a dashboard in different contexts. Ten expert evaluators from different expertise areas (System Administrators, UX engineers and QA engineers) have been used for this evaluation and a score based model was used to determine how efficient this dashboard is to view and drill information. Based on the results yielded from the evaluation, it is identified that the dashboard meets with the international standards of dashboard designs, well established security standards in dashboard design as well as provides the best user experience for users in different functional areas.
A Simple Machine Learning Approach for Identifying Promotional Short Message Service (SMS) Messages.
(Faculty of Computing and Technology, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka., 2017) Dias, D.S.; Dias, N.G.J.
Mobile phones play an integral part in the modern lives of humans. Short Message Services (SMS) Messages have become a popular mode for simple communication. Its’ simplicity, costeffectiveness and large audience has attracted the attention of advertising industry to send targeted promotional messages to mobile phones. In Sri Lanka, a survey conducted in Colombo, yielded that 3 out of 5 SMS messages received our promotional messages. Even though extensive research has been carried out in detecting junk SMS messages, the amount of research conducted on filtering promotional SMS messages is rare. The purpose of this research is to evaluate the success and accuracy of utilizing a simple machine learning algorithm to identify promotional SMS messages. Here, we have used a feed-forward neural network based on a statistical model, which was trained with a training data set consisting of promotional as well as non-promotional messages. Each test message was broken down in to individual words and filtered through by cleaning to form keywords which will have consist of a weight and probability value. With each message that is used to train, these values will be updated according to whether it is a promotional or a non-promotional message. When a message is tested through this neural network, the words of the message will be matched against the keyword’s weight and probability, which will then calculate a resultant probability. By setting a par-value, we can classify the test as a promotional or a non-promotional message. The proposed model yielded a 100% accuracy when tested within the given test data set. In order to get successful results for broader test data sets, the model has to be trained comprehensively with proper amount of promotional and non-promotional messages. Optionally, the results obtained from the feed forward neural network for incoming messages, can then be fed back in to the feed forward neural network for further training. As future work, we intend to take this solution to an android-based mobile application that extracts promotional messages from the incoming SMS messages as well as from a server, and display them to the user based on his preferences.