Annual Research Symposium (ARS)
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Item Development of a Linear-Model based Computer Software for Least Cost Poultry ration formulation(University of Kelaniya, 2008) Piyaratne, M.K.D.K.; Dias, N.G.J.; Attapattu, M.This study was based on the development of a user friendly, linear-model based computer software system for least cost poultry ration formulation. The software developed in this work used most recent advancements in the field of poultry nutrition and feeding, and developed to suit the local conditions. Sixty locally available feed ingredients were used and thirty nutrients which are most important to poultry growth were considered. Standard linear programming (LP) model for least cost ration formulation was used to analyze and determine the most efficient way of compounding the least cost ration. A mathematical model was constructed, taking into consideration nutrient composition of each of the available ingredient, costs and nutrient requirements of the birds2• Since the ideal protein (IP) concept is becoming popular as a mean of increasing the utilization efficiency of dietary proteins by poultry, NRC (N ational Research Council) and IICP (Ideal Illinois Chick Protein) ideal proteins were also included in broiler rations for calculations. Therefore, although the initial database was based on NRC recommendations users can freely customize ingredient levels and nutrient requirements as and when they required. Ration balancing can be done with 100% equal requirements up to 10-12 major nutrients based to least cost. The standard nutrient requirement levels can be customized and researchers can do experiments with different requirement levels. Therefore, this software can be a very useful tool for researchers, nutritionists as well as teachers. Amino acid profile selection feature allows researchers to formulate experimental rations with various amino acid levels and protein levels. The software can be run under Microsoft Windows environment and users are able to print and save results as well as initial database information. The software has been successfully installed, tested and evaluated successfully with several research projects.Item Interactive communication platform(University of Kelaniya, 2008) Jayaweera, A.J.P.M.P.; Dias, N.G.J.In this research, we put forward a new Concept of Interactive Communication Platform. Since remote IT infrastructure management is a new trend and an expanding area in the field of Information Technology. Communication is becoming a key factor of this new trend. The main objective of this concept is to design, build and develop a program suite for Interactive Communication infrastructure. Since communication is important in all aspects, communication should be fast, efficient and affordable. This program suite is capable of providing communication framework with cost benefits, reduce human intervention and reduce conventional paper usage by providing electronic data. Implementation of the interactive communication infrastructure has achieved by using three available advance communication technologies, which are fast, reliable and secure enough to work interactively on the platform. The implementation architecture described here based on the Electronic mail, Short Message Service (SMS) and XML Web services. The implementation of the interactive communication mechanism achieved dynamically by defining a set of instructions (Mail Rules) and based on a set of defined Protocols. The Mail Ruling system has described in terms of the two mechanisms Auto Reply Email and Mail Alert SMS, the set of protocols Auto Reply Email, Mail Alert SMS, Mail Reply SMS and SMS Mail defined for the implementation. Further, the implementation of the application suite was successful in the experimental domain and hence able to expand the boundaries and limitations in the individual communication mechanism. The main factor behind the success is a combination of widely expanded SMS technology with email, the efficiency and reliability of the communication improved by a significant percentage due to the combined platform.. Furthermore, the expected cost benefits was successfully achieved by the interactive communication framework. The system would be useful to wide verity of users, any individuals or any organizations to optimize their communication framework and increase the reliability and the efficiency of the communication. This framework could be able to push the communication mechanism to get the respond fast from the receiver to sender.Item An inventory control system with intelligent demand forecasting Facility(University of Kelaniya, 2008) Chandima, A.V.L.; Dias, N.G.J.An inventory control system is an integrated package of software and hardware used in warehouse operations, and elsewhere, to monitor the quantity, location and status of inventory as well as the related shipping, receiving, picking and put away processes. In common usage, the term may also refer to just the software components. An inventory control system may be used to automate sales, forecasting the demand of items and monitor the inventory related data. Demand Forecasting is the activity ofestimating the quantity of a product or service that consumers will purchase. Demand forecasting involves techniques including both informal methods, such as educated guesses, and quantitative methods, such as the use of historical sales data or current data from test markets. Demand forecasting may be used in making pricing decisions, in assessing future capacity requirements, or in making decisions on whether to enter a new market. Superinventory is a stand alone software suit consists of lot of functional capabilities developed by StarTech Enterprises Pvt. Ltd. Superlnventory consist of two sub systems they are import document management system and inventory control system. Under inventory control system it provides more convenient and up to date information to support the management process. Intelligent Demand forecasting facility is another option included in this system in order to facilitate the management to predict the future demand of the companies imported goods so that they can easily decide what should be imported, quantity that they need to import, etc. Two past year historical sales data was analyzed using Winter's forecasting model and forecast the demand of sales next two years in the company. Import document management system was decided that the storage of files can be achieved through a file cabinet and the copy of the arrangement can be maintained in the system to facilitate the users with advance searching facilities to locate the files easily. Another facility included in this system is the vendor selection expert. This will facilitate the users with the relevant information and assist the user in selecting the vendors who are capable of supplying the needed items. Here the vendors were recorded as and when they are introduce to the system through registration and record both the specialty and general production items. When user want to find the suitable vendor for the imports he/she just have to select the item and the system will automatically prompt the user with the available vendor options. Superlnventory was developed on the Microsoft Dot Net framework 1.1 with Visual C# for standalone windows application development. Database was developed using SQL server 2000.Item MBROLA Formatted Diphone Database for Sinhala Language(University of Kelaniya, 2007) Kumara, K.H.; Dias, N.G.J.; Wickramasinghe, R.l.P.Diphone synthesis is one of the most popular methods used for creating a synthetic voice from recordings or samples of a particular person. Diphones are speech units that begin in the middle of the stable state of a phone and end in the middle of the following phone. The main interest in diphone synthesis is that they minimize the concatenation problems. The aim of the MBROLA project, recently initiated by the Facult' e Polytechnique de Mons (Belgium), is to obtain a set of speech synthesizers for as many voices, languages and dialects as possible, free of use for non-commercial and non-military applications. Central to the MBROLA project is MBROLA 2.00, a speech synthesizer based on the concatenation of diphones, takes a list of allophones associated with prosodic information as input and outputs 16 bit linear speech samples. Diphone databases tailored to the MBROLA format are necessary to run the synthesizer. Therefore we put forward a Diphone database, tailored to the MBROLA format, to generate synthetic voice for Sinhala language through MBROLA .pho reader. The first step of building the diphone database was the fixing a list of all the phones (acoustic instances of phonemes) of Sinhala language. Creating the diphone database was achieved in three steps: Creating a text corpus, Recording the corpus and Segmenting the speech corpus. For the text corpus, we used few selected chapters of two Sinhala novels. The corpus was then red by two (Male and Female) native Sinhala speakers, digitally recorded and stored. Then all diphones were spotted manually with the help of Speech Viewer ofCSLU toolkit which was developed by the Center for Spoken Language Understanding, Oregon Graduate Institute of Science and Technology, USA. A diphone database was finally created with 1004 diphone segments, which summarizes the results in the form of: the name of diphoncs, the related waveforms, their duration, and internal sub-splittings. Since we did not consider allophone variations in all instances, it may reduce the naturalness of the resulting synthetic speech. It is also possible that the number of diphone segments may higher than the above number (1004). However, most of the common occurrences of diphones were included in the database that we have developed. 137Item Design and Implementation of a Web-Based Faculty Information System(University of Kelaniya, 2006) Kumara, K.H.; Munasinghe, L.; Jayasuriya, K.D.; Dias, N.G.J.; de Silva, C.H.; Kalingamudali, S.R.D.Although Information Systems (IS) are valuable elements for organizations, the private and public sectors in Sri Lanka are reluctant to use IS for decision making, organizing and classifying data, processing transactions, and for many other activities. This is caused by the lack of computer literacy and conventional attitudes of the majority of the Sri Lankan community. Even in the higher education institutions in Sri Lanka, majority of both staff and students who are well aware of information technology, rely on conventional ways of handling information. One major reason for the above issue is lack of availability of application software well suited for their needs. On one hand, such types of software are rarely used by institutes because of their high cost; on the other hand, they are highly organization dependent. Hence steps have been taken to build a Faculty Information System (FIS) for the Faculty of Science, University of Kelaniya. The FIS was developed in a network environment, with the active participation of all those involved by means of continuous dialogues with the aim of both promoting and demonstrating its benefits and by catering to the different needs arising from the faculty community. The FIS consists of three major subsystems, namely FIS Web Based Subsystem (FISW), FIS Intranet Sub System (FISI) and FIS Examination Sub System (FISE). FISW provides www access to FIS users at any time from anywhere. FISI enables the capability of access to FIS via the Faculty office local area network with security restrictions. FISE processes the examination data in a highly secured environment which is separated from both FISW and FISI. FISI and FISW eventually connect with FISE under security restrictions as required. It is clear that development of this type of tool has social, cultural and technological dimensions. What we planned is one thing, what happened in reality and how the stake holders respond to the tool is another. An evidence of the neediness of this type of tool to the faculty is the number of accesses, 41784, in two years. The above figure is not a complete measure of acceptance of FIS. To detect its defects and limitations, in addition it is necessary to take into account the number of pages requested by each registered user in the FIS. These statistics can be used to enhance the features of FIS.Item A tool for automatic segmentation of a given Sinhala text into Syllables for Speech synthesis and Speech recognition(University of Kelaniya, 2006) Kumara, K.H.; Dias, N.G.J.; Sirisena, H.In the present era of human computer interaction, the educationally under privileged and the rural communities of Sri Lanka are being deprived of technologies that pervade the growing interconnected web of computers and communications. One good solution for this problem would be computers talking to the common man in the language he is comfortable to communicate in. Sri Lankan population has a significant percentage of people who are educationally under-privileged. On one hand we claim that to build an EGovernment or an E-Society in Sri Lanka on the other hand, the advances we make are totally inaccessible by a large number of people in Sri Lanka. Under such circumstances, we cannot expect rural/educationally under-privileged people to use computers and IT products unless we remove the need of being literate, which exists as a barrier between them and computers. However, the interaction between the computer and the user is largely through keyboard and screen-oriented systems. In the current Sri Lankan context, this restricts the usage of computers to a miniscule fraction of the population, who are both computer-literate and conversant with written English. In order to enable a wider proportion of population to benefit from Information technology, there is a dire need for an interface other than keyboard and screen-interface that is widely in use at present. Speech technologies promise to be the next generation user interface. Software applications having speech and voice recognition abilities have a better chance to communicate with a large percentage of population which include educationally underprivileged, visually challenged and computer illiterates, if these applications can speak and understand the native language. It is well known that the transcription of orthographic words into syllables is one of the principal steps of a syllable based Speech synthesis and Speech recognition. Hence we put forward a dictionary based automatic syllabification tool for Speech Synthesis and Automatic Speech Recognition in Sinhala language. Also it is capable to provide the frequency distributions of Vowels, Consonants and Syllables of given Sinhala text. Although there is no universal agreement for syllable definition, in this research our syllable definition can be considered as Cn 0 V n 1 Cn 0 where Cn 0 signifies 0 to n consonants and V n 1 signifies 1 to n vowels. In this tool, detection of Syllable boundaries for a given Sinhala sentence is achieved by four main phases: (1) Reformat everything encountered (e.g. digits, abbreviations) into words and punctuation.(2) Derive a phonemic representation for each word. (3) Determine the C n 0 V n 1 units for a given word. (4) Reformat above Cn 0 V n 1 units according to the Cn 0 V n 1 Cn 0 definition in order to obtain the syllable boundaries. Following example will give a better explanation of the algorithm.Item An analysis of sound parameters for prosodic modeling in Sinhala text to speech synthesis(Research Symposium 2009 - Faculty of Graduate Studies, University of Kelaniya, 2009) Dias, N.G.J.; Kumara, K.H.; Dolawattha, D.D.M.Speech synthesis is the artificial production of human speech. A computer system used for this purpose is called a speech synthesizer, and can be implemented in software and/or hardware. Text-to-Speech (TTS) is one of the speech synthesis technologies. Before a synthesizer can produce an utterance, several steps have to be completed. Among them, after computing the basic pronunciation from authographic text, prosody annotation should be performed. Finding correct intonation, stress, and duration from written text is the most challenging problem for most of the natural languages. These features together are called prosodic or suprasegmental features and may be considered as the melody, rhythm, and emphasis of the speech at the perceptual level. Unfortunately, written text usually contains very little information of these features and some of them change dynamically during speech. However, with some specific control characters this information must be given (at least some extend) to the speech synthesizer to produce enough natural speech of the target language. On the other hand timing at sentence level or grouping of words into phrases correctly is difficult; in many languages, prosodic phrasing is not always marked in text by punctuation, and phrasal accentuation is almost never marked. If there is no breath pauses in speech or if they are in wrong places, the speech may sound very unnatural or even the meaning of the sentence may be misunderstood. As an example, in Sinhala, the input string " wïu wdjo@ ” " can be spoken as three different ways changing the intonation patterns as angry, sadness and sarcastic; giving three different meanings to the listener. Here intonation means how the pitch pattern or fundamental frequency changes during speech. The prosody of continuous speech depends on many separate aspects, it may be twice as high as with male voice and with children it may be even three, such as the meaning of the sentence and the speaker characteristics and emotions. Therefore it is clear that prosody plays a major role in speech synthesis, and a deeper treatment of prosody is a must in any kind of speech synthesis. In this work, in order to develop generic models for prosodic synthesis in speech synthesis, we selected 150 possible sentences in Sinhala Language and recorded them according to the above three intonation patterns (i.e. angry, sadness and sarcastic) with a female native speaker who is a well trained person in Drama and Theater. Then we computed various speech parameters for above 150X3 sentences using PRAAT speech processing tool developed by www.praat.org. Hence we found that for all above 150 sentences there is an incremental pattern in the duration from Angry to Sarcastic. No regular pattern in Median, Mean, Standard Deviation, Minimum, and Maximum values of the Pitch parameter. Regarding the pulses, we computed the Number of pulses, Number of periods, Mean period, Standard deviation of period for each of the above sound files and we observed that there is no regular pattern in the parameter Pulses. For voicing parameter we computed the Fraction of locally unvoiced frames, Number of voice breaks and Degree of voice breaks. However for this parameter there were not regular patterns too. Then we computed the Harmonicity values as Mean autocorrelation, Mean noise-to-harmonics ratio, Mean harmonics-to-noise ratio and found that there is no regular pattern. After computing the mean-energy intensity of each sentences, we found that there is an incremental pattern in the Intensity by concerning the order Angry, Sarcastic and Sadness. Finally we computed the formant values as First formant, First Bandwidth, Second Formant, Second Bandwidth, Third formant, Third Bandwidth, fourth formant and forth bandwidth and found that there is no regular pattern in different formant parameters. Although there are no regular patterns in most of the above speech parameters, in order to develop a more natural sounding speech synthesizer, however these parameters should be annotated with basic pronunciation computed from the authograpich text in speech synthesis. Therefore in future we hope to develop more generic probabilistic models based on this analysis to model above speech parameters for Sinhala speech synthesis.Item Designing and implementation of new computer software system for the Centre for Open and Distance Learning(Research Symposium 2009 - Faculty of Graduate Studies, University of Kelaniya, 2009) Dias, N.G.J.; Dolawattha, D.D.M.Nearly 150000 students were qualifying for university education in Sri Lanka annually. But only 18000 students are selected to follow different undergraduate courses in local universities where we have free education. Remaining students have to follow external degree programmes conducted by National universities, professional courses conducted by private sector institutes or Government institutes and few are going abroad for higher education. Large portion of students are registered annually at the University of Kelaniya among the students who follows external degree courses at different national universities. Nearly 85500 students were registered from 1993 to 2008 and 13716 students were graduated from them so far. We have identified that after the year 2005 more than 10000 students are registering annually. Five different degree courses are offered and 16 exams and 16 seminars need to be conducted for them annually by the CODL. We require more robust, powerful, user friendly and reliable Computer Software System (CSS) by considering rapidly growing students capacity and services rendered to them. On the other hand we require a CSS, because a new exam evaluation system (NEES) has been introduced from the student batch 2007. In that NEES offered course units with particular credit value and each student needs to be completed specified no of credits within a specified period of time relevant to the degree followed. CSS is a Management information System (MIS) type Multi-user Computer System working in a local network environment and password restricted users will be operated the system. Main functionalities will be student registration, conducting exams, printing admissions, printing transcripts and certificates and other required sub functionalities come under above. All functional requirements, non-functional requirements and domain requirements were identified. System was designed by integrating concurrency control and user authorization. The authorized users will only be the CODL Staff and categorize them according to their job assigned. (i.e. Student registration user, Examination data entry user etc.). User authorization subsystem considers different functionalities of the CSS and gives access to each user category by considering their job assigned. Limitations and constraints have to be considered when developing the CSS. It will not be connected to the Campus wide network and run in a separate server with a view to avoid internet hacking and reduce the internet virus risk. Examination results are being published on the CODL web, which runs in a separate server. Storing data in the database is unlimited and the database backup facility is an important feature. Potential usefulness of the CSS are the Maintainability and Modularity. An Integrated software process model was used to model the CSS between two software process models, Incremental development and Rapid application development. More user friendly and interactively interfaces will be developed in CSS. Designing the CSS is done using Rational Rose with object oriented software design techniques. It was developed on .Net framework using VB.Net as the front-end tool and SQL Server as the back-end tool.Item Design & implementation of an efficient SMS server(Research Symposium 2009 - Faculty of Graduate Studies, University of Kelaniya, 2009) Dias, N.G.J.; Rathnasekara, P.L.A.UShort Message Service (SMS) is one of the most popular services provided by the telecommunication companies all over the world. Due to the low cost and efficiency of this service compared to the traditional ways of sending messages, companies now a days use this technology heavily to send business messages to their customers and employers. The main objective of this in this research is to implement a SMS server using open source software with minimum resources. Basically a SMS server consists of two main features. It can be used for sending messages and the other is it can be used for receiving messages and store them in a database. Apart from these two features the proposed server consists of many other features such as categorization of receiving messages according to the type, restricting number of messages sending for the administrator, prevent the user to login to the server in the administrator defined hours, create template messages, allow only to login to the server through authorized client machines be (IP address) and etc. In order to achieve a higher level of security, we have stored the encrypted password together with the usernames for validating the users‟ login to the server. These data is retrieved through SQL commands using „data decryption‟ methods. The main function of this server is sending and receiving messages using a GSM modem. The initial step was to configure the GSM modem to connect it to the server machine through a USB port. A connection should be established with the SIM card, since the functionality of the modem is handled completely by the SIM card. After a connection is established, SMS can be sent and received from the SIM card using the „AT‟ commands (Hayes commands) technology. Sending messages and receiving messages are stored in the outbox table and inbox table of the database respectively. The box messages are then classified according to the type. CSV file uploading technology was used to insert data to the database, since it is more convenient to the user. Using this method messages are stored in a queue table and then send one by one automatically in a user desired time. When sending a message, server checks whether the recipient number is restricted or in the correct format. This server was built on Apache Tomcat web server and the web pages are created using JSP technology. MySQL database server, JDK 1.5 and Rational Rose S/W were used in the development of the database. The server was built using only one modem; however, this can be developed to support several modems to increase the efficiency when sending messages for millions of customers using the Queue. However the server developed is efficient and can be used in any company or organization in a robust manner.Item A tool for automatic derivation of phone transitions for the creation of a diphone database for Sinhala text to speech synthesis(Research Symposium 2009 - Faculty of Graduate Studies, University of Kelaniya, 2009) Kumara, K.H.; Dias, N.G.J.Since the conventional user interfaces such as keyboard and monitors restrict the usage of computers, there is a dire need for an interface other than keyboard and screen-interface that is widely in use at present. Speech technologies promise to be the next generation user interfaces. In general, two technologies for processing speech are needed. One is speech recognition, and the other is speech synthesis. Speech synthesis is the artificial production of human speech. A computer system used for this purpose is called a speech synthesizer, and can be implemented in software and/or hardware. Text-to-Speech (TTS) is one of the speech synthesis technologies. TTS can be defined as “the production of speech by machines, by way of the automatic phonetization of the sentences to utter”. Before a synthesizer can produce an utterance, several steps have to be completed. First, the right segments/units have to be selected. The units usually used are diphones, half-syllables, and triphones etc. Many synthesizers use diphones as their basic units of concatenation. A diphone is the transition between two speech sounds, obtained from natural speech. Creating a diphone database, which contains all the sound transitions in the target language, is critical in diphone TTS synthesis.