Posts

The WTM Scholarship (Previously Google Anita Borg Scholarship) APAC 2016

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In 2016, 50 students were selected from APAC for the WTM scholarship, and I was one of them. The scholarship includes a retreat to a Google Office, and a Scholarship Award to cover tuition fees. This year the retreat was in Hyderabad and the scholarship award was based on the country. Let me start from how I applied to the scholarship. I got to know about the "extended" scholarship deadline through my friend. Yes I would have missed it if not for the notice of it, and it was my last opportunity as an undergraduate since I was a final year student! I was really happy and applied with some doubt, but then I received a confusing email which made me apply from a different account. (since it was closer to the deadline there was no time for communication) So the application process went like that. Then due to my stressful final year, I completely forgot to check my alternative email and a friend told me that finalists are short listed. Then I logged to my email and there

Initiatives- RGSoC and Women's day with WTM

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I did two main initiatives that included a information session about RGSoC and panel discussion at WTM international women's day event on Anita Borg Scholarship and other opportunities for girls in tech!  RGSoC is happening in Sri Lanka for the first time and the mentor organization is SCoRe, my open source contributing organization. I had a session with SCoRe for our university girls from 1st year to 4th year. It included an introduction to program, application process and projects.  The second was a panel discussion with students at International Women's Day celebration event with WTM Sri Lanka. Dinu ( the other Anita Borg scholar) also joined for this. We shared about the WTM Scholarship  from Google, GSoC, RGSoC, Outreachy and research projects. Each event included around 100 participants.(200+ for both) The RGSoC session happened before the panel discussion. Almost none had heard about or applied for this before. After the session I got personal questions regarding a

Programs and Memory

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In computing, memory refers to the computer hardware devices involved to store information for immediate use in a computer (primary storage). Computer memory operates at a high speed,  such as random-access memory (RAM) with lower capacities. Storage provides slow-to-access program and data storage but offers higher capacities. Random-access memory (RAM) is a form of computer data storage which stores frequently used program instructions to increase the general speed of a system. If needed, contents of the computer memory can be transferred to secondary storage, through a memory management technique called "virtual memory". Virtual memory is a system where all physical memory is controlled by the operating system. When a program needs memory, it requests it from the operating system. The operating system then decides what physical location to place the memory in. The operating system with the help of a hardware component called MMU (memory management unit), maps thos

Achievements- 2016

True that I have not been writing for sometime, and I thought it would be good to begin this year's posts with my colourful last year's achievements and activitites. I hope to see an improved list at the end of this year! :) 1. Started the year with ending mentoring from SCoRe, at Google CodeIn contest for pre university students. 2. Was accepted to Google Summer of Code program from SCoRe. 3. Won the Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship APAC, which inculded a travel to Google office Hyderabad. 4. My first paper publication relating to my research area, Radio Tomography Imaging. (Couldn't attend the conference due to a clash between dates for Anita Borg retreat.) 5. Completed my one year research on Radio Tomography Imaging using WiFi. 6. Completed Christianity Diploma awarded by National Christian Council. 7. Was able to sing with an orchestra! (Soprano)  

Install Octave with GUI on remote machine

I used a VM provided by lab, to run octave scripts since RTI require computation and time. This is a step by step command list of how to install octave and run on a remote machine. ssh -X username@ip                            --> login to remote machine, note the '-X' apt-get install octave                           -->  Install octave in remote machine sudo apt-get install octave-statistics     --> Install octave statistics package sudo apt-get install octave-communications --> Install octave statistics package pkg list                                                  -->   to vie w the pa c kages installed. If installed the above two packages will appear. pkg list  octave --force-gui                   -->   to use the gui, this is only possible if you use '-X' option when login Transfer files using scp command. Now you can run octave scripts on remote machine :) Using below link, you can find h/w information of the remote machine.

Tikhonov Regularization on Radio Tomography Imaging

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Without waiting for a long progress I just thought of writing this small article as I'm proceeding with research on Radio Tomography Imaging. Patwari et al have given a regularization method "Tikhonov Regularization." With help from my supervisor to understand this operator, I came up with the following image which is a plot to identify a static human at location 9,9. The parameters width of the ellipse and pixel width are different to original author specifications, but the regularization parameter is the same. The code is found here , which I'm still in progress to develop.  Please feel free to point out any mistake. Thanks!

Create a WiFi hotspot manually in ubuntu laptop

This is a small post about creating a WiFi hotspot in ubuntu, using default network manager. Even if you don’t have a wireless Internet connection available to share, you can network computers together and communicate between them (share files etc.) by turning your laptop to a Hotspot/ Wireless Access Point. 1. Disable WiFi if it is enabled. (If you want to use internet, connect an internet cable ) 2. Go to Network Icon and select Edit Connections . Select Add button inthe window. 3. In the "Choose a connection" window, select Wi-Fi . 4. In the "Editing wifi-hotspot" window, type a connection name, SSID and select Infrastructure as Mode and select your wireless card as MAC address . 5. You can set your password if you want in the " Wi-Fi Security " tab. 6. In the "IPv4" tab, select Shared to other computers . Save the settings. 7. Now you can see a file with the connection name you gave, at /etc/NetworkManager/system-connecti