Convocation Award Winners 2022
The general convocation of the University of Moratuwa was held on 20th and 21st December, 2022, where graduates were presented to the Chancellor, Vidyajothi Prof. K. K. Y. W. Perera.
There were 16 graduates who followed the Bachelor of Science Honors in Biomedical Engineering degree and 105 who followed the Bachelor of Science Honors in Electronic and Telecommunication Engineering degree. Fifty nine students out of 115 intake 2017 students obtained first class honors. Amaya Dharmasiri won the prestigious Gold Medal for the Most Outstanding Graduate of the University. Deepana Ishtaweera won the Gold Medal for the Best Academic Performance of the University and the Gold Medal for the Most Outstanding Graduate of the Faculty of Engineering. He also won the Electronic and Telecommunication Engineering Gold Medal. Vinith Kugathasan won the Biomedical Engineering gold medal.
The department congratulates the graduates and winners of medals.
Team CircuitBreakers of ENTC Wins the IEEE Region 10 Robotics Competition
The Department of Electronic and Telecommunication Engineering at the University of Moratuwa is proud to announce the success of Team CircuitBreakers at the IEEE Region 10 Robotics Competition. The competition, which was held on 17 and 18 December 2022 at the Faculty of Engineering at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, Thailand, focused on the theme of “Robotics for Healthcare.”
Team CircuitBreakers, which consists of Shalutha Rajapakshe, Dilanka Wickramasinghe, Sahan Gurusinghe, and Deepana Ishtaweera, was mentored by Mr. Bhanuka Silva and supervised by Dr. Peshala Jayasekara. The team developed a collaborative quadcopter and hexapod robot system for disaster response missions, in which the quadcopter surveys and maps out the disaster environment while detecting victims, and the ground hexapod robot autonomously navigates to deliver medical packs and teleconference with victims.
The project was self-funded, with additional support from CSIRO Data 61 in Australia. Team CircuitBreakers emerged as the winner of the competition, beating out other teams from across the region.
The main objective of the competition was to raise awareness among young IEEE members about the importance of technology in providing solutions to real-world problems and to encourage creativity and innovation. Team CircuitBreakers’ groundbreaking project exemplifies this goal, using cutting-edge robotics technology to address the critical issue of disaster response.
The Department of Electronic and Telecommunication Engineering at the University of Moratuwa is proud of Team CircuitBreakers’ achievement and looks forward to seeing their continued success in the field of robotics.
Semester 2 Engineering Design Project Demonstrations
The Engineering Design Project module is a creative and enjoyable module offered by the Department of Electronics and Telecommunication Engineering at the University of Moratuwa. The new curricular—both electronic and telecommunication engineering and biomedical engineering—feature this new compulsory course module called Engineering Design Project in semester 2. The aim of this module is to provide a holistic view of the processes leading to design and manufacturing in electronic, telecommunication and biomedical engineering. The module trains the students on the use modularity and abstraction in solving engineering problems, applying basic engineering design principles, using design tools for electronic product prototyping, identifying various manufacturing processes involved in electronic product manufacture, designing a product prototype to comply with given technical specifications, and analyzing the performance and manufacturability of the developed prototype. This is the very start of the journey of engineering product design and manufacturing.
In this module four members were formed into teams and each team had to come up with a marketable electronic-related product that gives a solution to a prevailing problem in the society, they have to do marketing, PCB design, coding, enclosure design and all the stuff related to product manufacturing. There are a total of 30 groups (26 electronic and telecom groups and 4 biomedical groups) each focused on a specific field. This is a small description of selected products from those 30 products.
There was also a device that can indicate the remaining gas level of a LP gas cylinder. It is designed to help people monitor and manage their gas usage more efficiently. It will continuously measure and calculate the remaining gas percentage and display it on the mobile app, along with other analytics about gas usage. There were many more other exciting and innovative products that have design and created by ENTC undergraduates. Congratulate to all the teams who complete there project successfully.
Read MoreNBQSA 2022 – National ICT Awards
The final year project titled “Road Sign, Traffic Light and Static Object Detection for Self-Driving” won the Student Research Project of the Year Award and the Bronze Award for Tertiary Students Projects (Technology) at the National ICT Awards – NBQSA 2022. The project has also been nominated to APICTA (Asia Pacific ICT Alliance) Awards 2022 which will be held in Islamabad, Pakistan from 7th to 11th December 2022.
The National Best Quality Software Awards (NBQSA), which is held by the British Computer Society for the past 24 years, provides recognition to outstanding achievements of individuals and organizations in Sri Lanka in the ICT domain. The Tertiary Students Projects (Technology) Award targets the best technical solutions proposed and implemented by undergraduates while the Student Research Project of the Year Award identifies the undergraduate project with the highest research impact.
The award winning project is focused on real time detection of traffic signs, traffic lights, lanes and road markings in a resource constrained environment. Three deep learning based detection frameworks have been developed to cater this requirement and the trained detection models have been optimized using TensorRT and integrated together to deploy as a complete static object detection system on an embedded system. In addition, two benchmark datasets have been created, one for traffic signs and traffic lights, and the other for road markings in the Sri Lankan domain. The research contributions of the project have been published as three papers in IEEE ICMLA 2021, IEEE/CVF WACV 2022 and IEEE IV Symposium 2022.
Six ENTC Graduates Join Harvard as Post Baccalaureate Research Fellows to Work on Computational Imaging and Computational Biology
Six students in the graduating class Jathurshan Pradeepkumar, Kithmini Herath, Mithunjha Anandakumar, Ramith Hettiarachchi, Udith Haputhanthri, and Hasindu Kariyawasam, joined Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University as Post Baccalaureate Research Fellows to Work on Computational Imaging and Computational Biology.
Under the computational imaging areas, they will be particularly working on a new microscopy design framework named, differentiable microscopy which is a new concept introduced by the Harvard laboratory, Wadduwage lab. Under computational biology, they will be working on problems related to protein folding and protein design with SoLab.
SPARK Award Ceremony and Launch
At the SPARK award ceremony and launch the three top teams that proposed engineering solutions to problems that affect the society addressing the Sustainable Development Goals (https://sdgs.un.org/goals) won awards and cash prizes. This was after a year-long process of ideation and prototype development by many teams. Ten teams reached the final pitching round held on July 24, 2022. An eminent panel of judges comprising Mr. Fayaz Hudah, Mr. Chalinda Abeykon and Mr. Josh Robsen made the selection of winners.
Supun Kuruppu, Chirantha Kurukulasooriya, Dumindu Bandara, and Biyon Fernando as Team Phantom won the grand prize, a trophy and a cash prize of Rs 600,000. As the coral population throughout the world is rapidly declining due to the prevailing climate crisis and toxic human activities, Team Phantom proposed to collect the coral gametes using a robot to subsequently provide proper conditions for growth. The proposed robot automates the current process which the scientists have to undergo diving and collecting the gametes by themselves.
First runners up, Team Axon, comprised Nuwan Bandara, Sahan Hettiarachchi, Kulunu Dayasekara, Dasun Premathilake. They proposed a system to monitor the depth of anesthesia to tailor the drug administration to the individual patient, thus preventing excessive anesthetic depth and improves patients’ outcome. Second runners up, Team Fix-It, comprising Sahan Viduranga, Isuru Munasinghe, Yomali Lokugama, and Vishawa Oshadha introduced a system that continuously checks the pollutant levels of water in rivers and reservoirs. The two teams won Rs 300,000 and Rs 100,000 respectively.
Following the award ceremony, the SAPRK project launched the 2022-2023 challenge that includes the students of the Intake 2020. The event took place on July 30, 2022, at the Civil Engineering Auditorium. Mr. Heminda Jayaweera delivered the keynote address. The award ceremony and launch were educational, and exiting for all the participants.
SPARK Pitching Sessions
SPARK project aims to drive projects that solve crucial problems that mankind faces such as climate change, food scarcity, and inequality in education though the application of engineering principles. All these are important aspects of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (https://sdgs.un.org/goals). Approximately 35 student teams worked on developing solutions to problems that address one or more such goals. Ten groups were able to propose fully-developed ideas and make prototypes. This was possible after a long-term training provided by SAPRK with the involvement of foreign trainers.
As the culmination of this year-long process, the ten groups pitched their projects to an eminent panel of judges comprising Mr. Heminda Jayaweera, Mr. Fayaz Hudah, Mr. Chalinda Abeykon and Mr. Josh Robsen. This pitching session took place on July 24, 2022 at the Department of Electronic and Telecommunication Engineering in a vibrant setting with many students and staff members watching and deliberating about the possible impact of the projects.
Read MoreTeam AP116 wins Silver Award in the Grand Finals of InnovateFPGA Design Contest 2021/22
Team AP116, representing Pahan Mendis, Chathuni Wijegunawardana and Pamuditha Somarathne from the Department of Electronics and Telecommunication Engineering, has won the Gold Award in the Asia Pacific and Japan(APJ) region and the Silver Award from the whole world in InnovateFPGA Design Contest 2021/22. The team was guided by Dr. Ajith Pasqual as a faculty advisor and Mr. Abarajithan Gnaneswaran and Mr. Kithmin Wickramasinghe. This is the first time that a team from Sri Lanka has received one of top three prizes in this competition.
The InnovateFPGA Design Contest is a global competition based on Intel FPGAs, which is organized by Terasic Inc. with the collaboration of Intel Cooperation, Analog Devices, Microsoft as diamond sponsors and Digi-key, Mouser Electronics, Arrow Electronics and Macnica as gold sponsors. The theme for this year’s competition was ‘Connecting the edge for a sustainable future’. The teams were encouraged to utilize Intel FPGA Cloud Connectivity Kit, Microsoft Azure IoT and Analog Devices Plug-in boards in their projects.
To address these objectives, our team brought forth a concept of the Green Machine, a smart, user-friendly, domestic mini-greenhouse system to enable users to grow and efficiently monitor and tend to plants with much ease. This is suitable for domestic users to grow their own food in their homes. Also, due its modular design, the farmers can combine multiple units of Green Machines for cultivation in small to large scale farms. The condition within the Green Machine is monitored using a set of sensors and cameras and the sensor and image data is sent to the Terasic DE-10 Nano, a development kit based on Intel CycloneV SoC FPGA, for processing. After the processing, the sensor and image data are transferred to a Cosmos Database System on Microsoft Azure to be analyzed for further optimizations. Our team initially submitted their proposal back in October and got selected to the regional semi-finals along with 74 other teams in the APJ region. Then, they received the Intel Cloud Connectivity Kit with Terasic DE10 Nano Development board and 3 plug-in boards from Analog Devices to develop their project. They submitted a detailed design paper and a demo video in April and got selected to the regional finals. They went through a virtual QnA session with judges from Terasic, Intel, Microsoft and Analog Devices during the regional finals and emerged as the Gold Award Winners in the APJ region. With that, they were invited to the Grand Finals at the Intel Innovation Campus in San Jose, California, USA with 10 other teams around the world. Unfortunately, due to the rising covid cases in California, the Grand Finals later shifted into a virtual format. Nevertheless, our team presented their project with several improvements, to the Grand Finals in June and received much appreciation for its sustainability impact and the project presentation. The event was judged by experts from Terasic, Intel, Microsoft, Analog Devices and Digi-key.
Migara Ratnatunga Trust Award for Industrial Training for Undergraduates 2020/2021
Kalana Abeywardena, an immediate graduate of Department of Electronic and Telecommunication Engineering, University of Moratuwa, won the Migara Ratnatunga Trust Award (All island 1st place – Category A) for the year 2020/2021 which was awarded by the Institution of Engineers, Sri Lanka (IESL) for the best Electronic and Telecommunication Engineering trainee who portrayed excellent performance at Industrial Training. The award (a cash prize and certificate) was presented at the IESL induction and graduation ceremony on Friday, June 17, 2022.
Kalana completed his 6 months industrial training at the School of Computer Science of the University of Sydney, Australia as a Visiting Research Student under the supervision of Dr. Suranga Seneviratne in 2019. During the training, he was mainly engaged in two projects: he developed a cyber security framework to address phishing attacks on websites using computer vision and artificial intelligence and worked on depth filters and artificial intelligence to process Light Field signals to improve their signal power. Moreover, he worked as an undergraduate assistant in a summer program organized by the University of Sydney for international students from China.
Migara Ratnatunga Trust Award is awarded to the high achievers of level 3 industrial training module at the Annual sessions of IESL. The results of the evaluations done by the university training division will be submitted to the IESL, where a few undergraduates would be recognized as high achievers in the compulsory industrial training module in the engineering undergraduate program after a rigorous evaluation among the undergraduates of other state universities.
Team University of Moratuwa Selected as Finalists in the IEEE International Future Energy Challenge 2022
A team of undergraduates from the Dept. of Electronic and Telecommunication Engineering and Dept. of Electrical Engineering at the University of Moratuwa has been selected for the Grand Finals of the IEEE International Future Energy Challenge 2022 for the first time in Sri Lanka. This is a prestigious power electronics competition organized by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and sponsored by the IEEE Power Electronics Society, IEEE Industry Application Society, IEEE Power and Energy Society and Power Source Manufacturers’ Association.
The team advisors:
Prof. Udayanga Hemapala – Head Department of Electrical Engineering
Dr. Subdoha Charles – Senior Lecturer at the Department of Electronic and Telecommunication Engineering
Mr. Thilina Ambagahawaththa – Lecturer at the Department of Electronic and Telecommunication Engineering
Mr. Iresh Jayawardana – Graduate of the Department of Electronic and Telecommunication Engineering
The team members from the Department of Electronic and Telecommunication Engineering:
Pahan Mendis – Team Leader
Pamuditha Somarathne
Punsara Mahawela
Ransara Wijitharathna
Dineth Mudalige
Chathuni Wijegunawardana
Hiruni Wijewardena
Nikeshi Kumarasinghe
Limalka Sadith
Supun Kuruppu
Biyon Fernando
The team members from the Department of Electrical Engineering:
Nawanjana Yesith
Geshan Sudasinghe
For this competition, the team designed a smart efficient and light microgrid inverter that converts DC power from a solar panel into AC. Since 2010, solar costs have declined 70% to 80% in the world, making solar one of the most economical ways for energy generation. However, integrating renewable and distributed energy resources, such as photovoltaics (PV) and energy storage devices, into the electrical applications requires advanced power electronics, or smart inverters, that provide efficient and reliable power management. The team target to achieve an efficiency greater than 95% and a bulk manufacturing cost less than $200 in their inverter.
The team progressed through the initial selection round where they submitted their proposal for the inverter that caters the set of given specifications. During the semi-final round, 13 teams from prestigious universities in the world demonstrated their hardware design of the proposed inverter. Our team from University of Moratuwa, along with 7 other teams from Europe, Canada, and America, have been selected for the grand finals based on the technical quality of the design and the progress of hardware implementation demonstrated in the semi-final round. The final competition will be held between 27th-29th of July 2022 at University of Tennessee, Knoxville, USA.
The complete hardware prototype of the inverter will be tested for its performance in front of judges and industry experts at the grand finals. A group of students representing the Team UoM is planning to visit the USA with the designed inverter for this final competition.
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