Saturday, November 26, 2016

Prof.Thiemo's Visit to SCoRe lab in 2016

It is not necessary to mention that Prof.Thiemo Voigt is a regular visitor here. He used to visit Sri Lanka and meet our SCoRe group once in every year. This time, he arrived Sri Lanka on Last Sunday night. Without taking a break, the next day morning which was a Monday, he visited UCSC and met us. On this first day, we had organized a journey to goto Galle, Sri Lanka in order to allow him to goto the beach and get socialized with us. Everybody of our SCoRe group visited there with him. We all went to Jungle Beach in Unawatuna and had a bath in the sea. Then we had lunch from a nearby restaurant. It was about 5.00pm in the evening when we return to Colombo. Therefore, we didn't schedule any other work for that day.

Namal demonstrating the electric fence.
The next day, Thiemo delivered a talk in UCSC and his topic was "A highly efficient, low-cost backscatter reader". There he described a new technology they have published recently about a backscatter communication. After his talk and the lunch, we dedicated the rest of the evening to show off the outcomes of project works in our lab. Our guys in the lab had done a lot of hard work to prepare the demonstrations. Every thing went smoothly on the demonstrations. We mainly demonstrated the components of the elephant project which includes smart electric fence, infrasonic localization system and elephant detection with drone footages. In addition to the guys in our lab, some 4th year students also joined with us on this. It was a great day with so much enthusiasm. Finally, few guys from the lab joined with Thiemo to go for a dinner to which I didn't join since I had some other works.

Discussion at the infrasonic localization demonstration.
The third day of Thiemo's stay in Sri Lanka was the last day. We had a meeting in the morning to discuss about the next moves we should take on our collaborative project. Most importantly, we discussed about the potential improvements we can make in the paper which got rejected recently from a conference. We went through the comments of the reviewers and noted various actions to make as a response. Finally, we selected another venue to submit the paper soon after making improvements. In the evening of that day, Thiemo delivered a lecture for the MSc students. A part of the lecture was same as the guest talk he delivered a day before however the second part was something new. I attended to this lecture too and learned some new things. After the lecture, he took a little more time to have a on-line meeting with some student before conclude the day. Some of our guys again joined with him to go for dinner after which he left for the airport.