Local tech prodigy ranks second at Asian Softec-05

Arif Reza Anwary holding Banglar Manob-II with his CSE dept. head, Fayyaz Khan

Participants representing their country are given the opportunity to demonstrate individual performances at Softec. The event being organised by National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences (NUCES) of Pakistan witnessed around 280 projects under different themes.

In the year 1995, the students of NUCES Lahore laid the foundation of the largest student body, SOFTEC - SOFTware Exhibition and Competition, to provide an outlet for the ingenious and innovative brains and a platform to facilitate the exchange of information, ideas and opinions related to the field of information technology.

This time, SOFTEC widen its horizon and invited the whole Asia to come and participate in the competitions. Asian countries including India, China, Japan, Bangladesh and many more took part at the 10th edition and the first ever all Asian level competition.

Software competition, dynamic programming competition, ideas Xtreme and gaming competition were put on for the two day exhibition held on March 12 and 13.

Anwary, a computer science and engineering (CSE) student of UAP equipped a robot named 'Bangla-Manob II' with object detection, face detection, eye movement recognition, voice instruction and picture capturing ability at Softec. Using Visual Basic (VB) coding in the front end and Mathlab for analytical purpose, Anwary impressed the judges enough to acquire a second place at the competition.

Mathlab has been used to determine the number of harmonies, which allows the recognition of an object or human. VB was used in the front line for image viewing, loading and capturing purposes. The movements of the robot were based on motors and other hardware inserted in the robot and indicators acknowledged the human voice commands. A microphone placed before the robot's mouth was used to transfer the voice commands to the computer through Radio Frequency.

Bangla-Manob II, is able to respond to human orders to the extent it has been updated with and instructions allow him to indicate through lights in different parts of its body, such as his eyes, hands and legs. Besides it is able to identify objects and human beings, which are pre-stated in its database. Once a person introduces himself to Bangla-Manob II, just the way two persons do, he will be able to identify the person next time onwards.

While talking to StarTech, Anwary spoke about his future project, which could be a robot that operates through synchronising with the human thought process. "All I will do is just think, and the robot will do it for me. All I need is to make it understand the algorithms and object recognition, should not be that though as I have already implemented something like it", said the tech pro. It is possible because when we think, the neuron synapse in our brain generates a very micro level frequency, which the earth tries to detect and Anwary anticipates an equation out of it, which could prove to yet another revolution in automation.

The fourth year CSE student received his first award at the NSU SoftFair 2004. Not only has he achieved the academic awards but he has also developed projects for Bangladesh Air Force (BAF), UAP civil research team and UAP software and hardware club.

Even though Softec could not earn the attention of many universities within Asia, being the first of such an event in the region, it had been able to sort a way out to make further establishment of ICT in this part of the world.