Australian National University

http://thedailystar.net/campus/2009/03/05/abroad.htm

THE Australian National University, commonly abbreviated to ANU, is a public teaching and research university located in Canberra, Australia and has a motto of Naturam Primum Cognoscere Rerum

(Latin for ‘First, to learn the nature of things’). This university was established by an act of the Parliament of Australia on 1 August 1946, with the legislated purpose of conducting and promoting research in Australia.

Today, the university is consistently ranked as the best university in Australia, and is one of only three Australian universities in the top 50 worldwide in several international surveys, including the Newsweek Top 100 and the annual Times Higher Education Supplement rankings. Its notable staff and alumni include five Nobel laureates.

The university is a member of several university alliances and cooperative networks, including the Group of Eight (Australian Universities), the Association of Pacific Rim Universities, the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy and the International Alliance of Research Universities.

After its establishment, the university conducted research and provided only postgraduate education. The former Canberra University College was amalgamated into the Australian National University in 1960, as the School of General Studies, to provide for the education of undergraduate students.

The university is split into seven colleges and the Institute of Advanced Studies. The colleges undertake both undergraduate teaching, postgraduate studies and research. The Institute of Advanced Studies comprises of nine research schools which focus exclusively on research.

The ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences consists of over 20 teaching and research disciplines in the fields of arts, humanities and social sciences. The College is particularly strong in Political Science. Also part of this college are the ANU School of Music and ANU School of Art.

The ANU College of Asia and the Pacific focuses on study relating to Asia and the Pacific region.

The College houses a great number of scholars working on Asia-Pacific outside the region.

The ANU College of Business and Economics carries out research and teaching in accounting, finance, statistics and economics. The college is a leader in economics research in Australia.

The ANU College of Engineering and Computer Science comprises the School of Computer Science, the School of Engineering and the Centre for Sustainable Energy Systems. Some staff and postgraduate students from the two schools are also affiliated with the Research School of Information Sciences and Engineering which exists within the college as part of the university’s Institute of Advanced Studies.

The ANU College of Law is an academic leader in several areas including International Law, Tort Law, Constitutional Law and Public Law, having been ranked first in these subject areas compared to all other Australian universities.

The ANU College of Medicine and Health Science is home to the newest of university’s schools, the ANU Medical School, which runs a four-year postgraduate entry course.

The ANU College of Science is the largest of the university’s Colleges.

The Institute of Advanced Studies is focused on post-graduate education and research and comprises nine research schools and a research centre:

*Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics
*Research School of Biological Sciences
*Research School of Chemistry
*Research School of Earth Sciences
*Research School of Information Sciences and Engineering
*Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies
*Research School of Physical Sciences and Engineering
*Research School of Social Sciences
*The John Curtin School of Medical Research
*The Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies
More information can be found at the university’s official website:
www.anu.edu.au

Information Source: Wikipedia

Spotlight: Thoughts on Independence Day

http://www.thedailystar.net/campus/2009/03/04/camspotlight.htm

http://www.thedailystar.net/campus/2009/03/04/camspotlight_better.htm

in·de·pen·dence (nd-pndns)
n.
1. The state or quality of being independent.
2. Archaic Sufficient income for comfortable self-support; a competence.

26th March, 2009 would mark the 38th year of our independence. On this day in 1971, we as a nation finally found our identity after having been ruled by foreign invaders for hundreds of years.

The early traces of civilization here in Bengal date back to four thousand years, and the first settlers included the Dravidian, Tibeto-Burman and Austro-Asiatic peoples. Although the exact origin of the words ‘Bangla’ or ‘Bengal’ is unknown, it is widely believed to have been derived from Bang, the Dravidian-speaking tribe that settled in the area around the year 1000 BC. Since then, Bengal has seen itself being ruled by many foreign forces.

After being ruled by Hindu and Buddhist kings, Muslim invaders, the Mughals, the British and finally the Pakistanis, we finally managed to have our true identity in 1971 as Bangladeshis. But after thirty-eight years of being independent, one may ask how much of the values of the War of Liberation have truly been fulfilled? How much have we truly progressed?

Perhaps it is easy to make excuses about the many problems we face as a small country with a staggeringly high population and very few natural resources. Perhaps we would still like to be called a young nation. But how logical would these claims be? Let’s have a look at another Asian country, similar to us in many aspects, but yet so different!

Singapore, a small island city-state in South Asia, with a land mass two hundred times smaller than that of our country, gained its full sovereignty in 1965, not long before our independence.

Starting off with problems including mass unemployment, housing shortages, and a dearth of land and natural resources, Singapore today has not only overcome all these problems, but has grown to be the fifth most economically solvent country in the world with a per capita income of over $50,000/yr, just about fifty times of what we earn! In spite of having a population density of 6814/km2 (six and a half times that of our country), Singapore today has to import manpower from different countries across Asia, including Bangladesh.

So, did the government in Singapore have a magic wand? They definitely did not; what they had was consistency and long term plans, which sadly, we always fail to achieve. In spite of the huge human resource available in our country we have failed to truly achieve according to our potentials. What are the things that have been holding us back as a nation?

Lack of long term planning: A couple of months back, Prothom Alo, a leading Bengali newspaper of Bangladesh, published a four-page special supplement about the hundreds of unfinished bridges that can be seen all across the country, a glaring example of how much we fail in our long term plans. The story of course is same; if one government starts a bridge or a road, the construction work goes on till that government is in power. As soon as there is a change of government, the bridge/road/project is left stranded, just like that!

Power Shortage: The buzzword today seems to be of a Digital Bangladesh, promised to be delivered by the year 2021 by the current government. Although an ambitious plan, it is still doable given that certain prerequisites are met first. The government should make the production of electrical energy a first priority since the country simply cannot prosper with a power shortage of 2000 MW every day!

Fighting amongst ourselves: Why do we tend to fight amongst ourselves? Between political parties? Between different faiths? Between different ideologies? It’s time that all of us should start behaving like responsible citizens in order to take our country forward.

Student Politics: Student Politics in Bangladesh have gone drastically wrong and it must be stopped in all institutions at once. Students of colleges and universities are meant to study and not have armed fights between themselves!

Corruption: I personally believe the single most important factor that has been holding us back is corruption. Corruption truly is the root of all evil. It is easy to remain oblivious about it and think that it is something done only by politicians and government servants only. Very wrong; we are all corrupt in our own different ways. To avoid being fined after violating a traffic law, we offer bribes to the policeman; we do that to make things work faster. Guess what? That makes us equally corrupt and hence the practice continues. It’s high time that all of us change our ways.

But amidst all these obstacles, we are still moving forward because there are certain things that bind us as a nation. First and foremost is the sovereignty of the land that our forefathers fought for.

We are all one when it comes to that. Simple things like a game of cricket between Bangladesh and any other team in the world or the Pahela Boishakh celebrations show our oneness as a nation. So on the occasion of the thirty-eighth year of our independence, let us all promise to overcome these problems and build a better and beautiful Bangladesh.

The cynics would still ask, can we really overcome all these hurdles and march forward? The answer of course is, Yes we can!

[StarTech] TechNews – Adaptive lighting for grandpa!

http://www.thedailystar.net/story.php?nid=80430

Today, the major source of light in most of our apartments and offices, like it or not, constitutes of artificial lights and not natural lights! And it is no secret that artificial light affects us in subtle ways; at its best, ambient lighting can relax, soothe or excite, but used poorly it can drain us of energy and disrupt sleep. Ever thought about a lighting system that could adapt automatically to meet our individual needs?

According to a report published in ICT Results of the European Commission Website, a team of European researchers say the result would be an improvement in the general wellbeing of anybody who spends long periods in artificially lit buildings, particularly the elderly and the infirm, but also factory and office workers.

“Studies have shown that the quality and type of lighting can have a significant impact on our health and comfort,” explains Edith Maier, a researcher at Vorarlberg University of Applied Sciences (FHV) in Austria.

Maier coordinated the EU-funded Aladin project which brought together academic and industrial partners from Austria, Germany, Hungary, Italy and Romania to develop an innovative ambient lighting system that adapts intelligently to individual needs and wishes.

The system uses information from biosensors worn by the occupants of a room or building to determine what users are doing and then changes the lighting accordingly. The researchers’ goal is to use the technology to improve the wellbeing of the elderly, people suffering from age-related illnesses and people with reduced mobility, many of whom spend a lot of time confined indoors.

“Poor lighting can accentuate existing vision problems and reading difficulties among the elderly, it can cause depression and disrupt sleep cycles,” Maier says. “By automatically adapting the lighting in a room to what people are doing, many of these psychological and physiological problems can be reduced.”

Most adaptive ambient lighting systems in use today do not take individual needs and activities into account. They rely instead on a preset-time cycle to brighten and dim during certain periods of the day. In contrast, the Aladin system uses data from sensors in a glove worn by users to measure their heart rate and skin conductance response the electrical resistance of the skin which goes up during periods of activity and down while at rest. Fed wirelessly into a control system, the bio-data lets the system know automatically when to switch between a brightly lit “active setting” and a more subdued relaxation mode.

More than a hundred people participated in a series of lab and field tests conducted in Austria, Italy and Germany. The trials showed that elderly people quickly learnt how to use the system and, over the course of three months, experienced improvements in their general wellbeing, including less trouble reading and less disturbed sleep patterns.

Source: ICT Results (European Commission Website)

Interview of Zeinab Badawi of the BBC World Service Trust

http://www.thedailystar.net/campus/2009/03/02/feature_interview.htm

THE BBC World Service Trust is the BBC’s international development agency. It uses media and communications to reduce poverty, promote human rights and improve people’s lives. It has worked in over 40 countries worldwide, implementing projects in health, education, environment, governance, human rights, livelihoods and emergency response. The BBC World Service Trust launched its first significant programme in this country through “Bangladesh Sanglap” in November 2005. Sanglap is a weekly political debate program produced by the BBC Bengali Service in conjunction with the BBC World Service Trust. In May 2008, the BBC World Service Trust launched its second major program in Bangladesh “English in Action,” using television, radio, mobile phones and the Internet to improve English language skills.

About Zeinab Badawi
ZEINAB Badawi is the presenter of World News Today, one of BBC World News’hour-long news and analysis programmes. The programme features reports and discussions with leading BBC correspondents, and interviews and debates with people who are making the news around the globe. Previously a presenter of BBC World News’ The World, Zeinab has worked in British broadcasting for two decades. She has worked on a range of programmes reporting from Europe, Asia and Africa, where she covered the famine in the mid-Eighties. After a stint in reporting and presenting programmes on British politics live from the BBC’s Westminster studios, Zeinab joined BBC World News where she has become a regular face, presenting debates on major issues as well as being a presenter of HARDtalk, interviewing personalities such as the Dalai Lama and US General Tommy Franks.

_____________________________________________________

BBC World News, in association with The BBC World Service Trust, is producing a special edition of The World Debate from Bangladesh. Presented by Zeinab Badawi, the debate will ask ‘Are there too many people in the world?’ The debate has been recorded at Dhaka’s Lalbagh Fort on the 25th of February and it will be broadcast in April on BBC World News.

Experts from different sectors were included in the panel and they have considered a range of issues including:

* Is rising global population sustainable?
* Can technological advances and economic growth provide for all?
* Might migration help address population imbalances around the globe?
* Should population numbers be controlled and if so how?
* Should we worry about population shrinking?

______________________________________________________________________________

The following interview was taken a day prior to the Debate (on 24th February 2009).

Star Campus (SC): What is the main purpose and functionalities of the BBC World Service Trust?

Zeinab Badawi (ZB): The BBC World Service Trust is a charitable arm of the BBC and it uses the expertise of the BBC in terms of journalism and information dissemination. The fundamentals are based on Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (freedom of expression, freedom of opinion). We were always struck by the fact that the Indian Nobel Prize winning economist Amartya Sen said that ‘there has never been famine in a country where there is freedom of expression and freedom of information’. We always try to ensure that local people can disseminate information through whatever media, whatever form, to the people of that country. Mediums that can be used include the radio, or perhaps for a wider audience, sending a message through a dramatized program. It’s the power of the media to inform the public about different issues including public health and so on. Also, there are issues of governance, which is a very important issue here in Bangladesh and it is just not enough to say somebody has the right to vote. They have to understand about the candidate’s ability. But the organization is not only concerned with political issues, but rather it acts as a facilitator of local people.

We have many different programs, including the Active Literacy program in Somalia, Promotion of the English Language program, it doesn’t have a one-side fixed approach. It takes into consideration what the locally engaged people say about the needs of their country, for instance in Darfur, people were helped to find out where they could get help or humanitarian aid, since an emergency situation is in existence there. And in Khartoum, the Trust has helped train local journalists in order to give them a media framework and make them understand how to present important news in a balanced fashion. The main objective is to help people help themselves. It doesn’t really do or build things like build a hospital but makes people aware that they need one. We have different programs about the prevention of malaria and HIV-AIDS. In Bangladesh, we have a program called Bangladesh Shonglap. We are a new organization and we have had discussions about whether we should keep the word ‘BBC’ with the name of the trust or not. But keeping in mind that we have the same values as that of BBC, we finally decided to keep it.

SC: The topic for the debate at Lalbagh is about different issues related to population. What made you choose Bangladesh as the country where this will be discussed?

ZB: The question that we are going to ask is, is there an impending global population crisis? I don’t want to give anybody the impression that we are asking if there are too many people in the world? And that there are too many people in Bangladesh! We came to Bangladesh to discuss if there is a thing as population crisis globally and for some countries it could mean a shrinking population as well as ones which are expanding too rapidly for their governments to cope up with. Australia, Japan and some countries in Europe are facing severe problems because of their steadily aging population. In Bangladesh, the population growth has long been a problem specially because of global warming, floods and other problems which is claiming your land. So Bangladesh was a good place to discuss the issue.

SC: Is there any reason behind choosing the Lalbagh fort for the debate tomorrow?

ZB: The only reason is it’s a beautiful fort and it’s going to look even better when it gets floodlit. The weather too is very good at this time of the year and it sure is going to portray a positive image of Bangladesh. Enclosed auditoriums and conference rooms are present everywhere; this is what is going to make the country look different.

SC: How important do you think debate is as an extra curricular activity in schools, colleges and universities? Students of today will become future Presidents and Prime Ministers. Does it help in their grooming up?

ZB: The format of debate is a very good discipline to make young people aware of what’s happening around them at a very early age. Sometimes in the media it is said that you are trying to oversimplify issues by saying that something is for and against, the world is not black and white, it’s grey. I have sympathy with that point of view, however I believe that a debate, in the true sense of the word, helps to clarify your thoughts when you have to take a stance for or against an opinion. It is not just a superficial exercise. It forces people to think hard.

SC: You’ve been very successful in terms of journalism, news presentation and conducting the debates and also in the World Service Trust. What would be your advice for young girls, budding journalists who are coming into this profession these days in Bangladesh?

ZB: There is no step-by-step guide to do this. I have been in this profession for a while now. The key thing I’d say is to be interested. Be interested in people around you. You must have that curiosity which you never ever lose. Freedom of expression is very important and many people in the world do not have that. So one has to ask if there is something more than just showing my face on TV!

[StarTech] TechSpotlight – The power of Bangla

http://www.thedailystar.net/story.php?nid=78544

CRBLP of BRAC University unveils two revolutionary software

The image left shows how a scanned image has been converted to editable Bangla unicode text with the OCR application, right, a screen shot of the ‘Katha’ application that reads aloud any Bangla text when typed.

Imagine a blind person being able to use a computer almost as efficiently as someone with eyes! All he does is take the mouse cursor to a certain position in the screen and the computer reads him aloud whatever button there is. That too in Bangla!

This, and a few more marvels would now be available for free to all the people who want to use Bangla for many different reasons in their everyday lives thanks to two newly released products by CRBLP (Center for Research for Bangla Language Processing) of BRAC University.

On February 19, CRBLP announced the first official release of its Bangla language processing software packages ‘Katha’ (text-to-speech) and BanglaOCR (optical character recognition). In the event, the audience (which included experts in the field and several blind people) was shown how the computer could create Bangla unicode text from scanned images and then read out the text.

The TTS and OCR run on Linux, Windows and Mac OSX. There is also a web-enabled front-end for the TTS (and under development for the OCR), making these tools available at anytime and from anywhere. Currently, the group is working on better integration with screen readers in collaboration with the vision impaired community.

The Bangla language processing tools developed at CRBLP are free and open source software, released under GNU Public License v2, and supported in part by funding from Canadian IDRC and BRAC University.

“We have come a long way, but we have even a longer way to go” says Dr. Mumit Khan, professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the university and the head of CRBLP. “We are trying to develop capacity for Bangla Language Processing in Bangladesh. These days we are talking about ICT and Digital Bangladesh. If you talk about ICT for a country, you have to localise. And localisation means not only translation, you also need to incorporate local culture for widespread use.”

“We start from very basic spelling checkers and Optical Character recognition. Speech synthesis would enable us not to type but dictate. That would make not only a recording, but also turn it into editable text, where you can check for spellings and grammatical errors. These things are present for the English Language through various softwares. For all this to happen in Bangla, you need a lot of linguistic research at first. And in Bangla we are a bit behind in all this. So for us, the first step was capacity building. It took us a year and a half to find out what we needed to know. So our target was to do something simple yet concrete – make applications that people can use,” he added.

A Corpus (list of words in usage in Bangla, something not found in the dictionary), efficient spell checkers, OCR, machine translation, syntax checking all these are required to make full-scale Bangla computing possible.

So the purpose of the research is to:

1) Build linguistic resource using Corpus

2) Create new applications

3) Develop capacity

These applications will help in different forms of academic research because there is a huge literacy problem in this country.

The target of TTS includes three kinds of people:

1) The illiterate

2) The Visually impaired

3) People who can’t read Bangla

OCR has infinite applications including fast digitalising of old and rare Bangla books, which would save a lot of time compared to manually typing all the words in those books.

When asked about the inspirations behind developing these applications, Dr Khan mentioned Sightsavers International and the JPUF (Jatiyo Protbondhhi Unnoyon Foundation). Through the usage of these applications, blind people too, can become citizens of the ‘net world’. The sponsors for these projects are the IDRC, Canada (International Development Research Corporation) under its PAN Localisation Project and BRAC University itself.

“At this stage, the text to speech software sounds a bit wooden but we hope to improve on it within the next six months or so. For example, Amar Nam Sanjida sounds like Amar Nam Sa-no-ji-da right now. The good news is that this is just the beginning to even better applications. Future developments would include the female voice, which is an even more difficult thing to do, and intonation inclusive of mood variations, whether the person is angry or in a good mood. Right now we are working on the ‘Broadcast dialect’. Incorporating dialect is an altogether new issue,” he mentioned

At CRBLP, there are 6 researchers in the core group and many other people are affiliated with the research projects including students and teachers from the Dhaka University Linguistics Department (with whom the centre has a MoU) and researchers from 14 other countries.

When asked about the state of research in the field of computer Science in Bangladesh, Dr. Khan said that their sure is room for improvement but research in his field is not totally inexistent as many people would think. Other than CRBLP, he mentioned Prof Saidur Rahman’s (Buet) research on graph theory which is being internationally acclimated.

For more information on the research centre and its activities may visit CRBLP’s website http://www.bracu.ac.bd/research/crblp/.

Short Notes:
1) TTS: The TTS (Text to Speech) application generates speech from Bangla text. This can help tackle illiteracy problem, empower the visually impaired and increase the possibilities of improved machine-interaction. This project has developed a TTS system for Bangla using diphone and unit selection concatenation techniques based on the Festival speech synthesis technology. The developers in this project are Firoj Alam, S.M. Murtoza Habib and Kamrul Hayder.

2) OCR: Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is the process of converting printed text images to editable text. This project has developed a Bangla OCR that takes the scanned image of a printed page or document as input and converts it into editable Unicode text. The developers in this project are Md. Abul Hasnat and Souro Chowdhury.