Discussion forums, either as a whole or in small groups are some of the pronounced ways to get students to interact with one another, primarily when we use formal discussion prompts or provide informal opportunities for collaboration or topical discussion.
The ELC English Society organized its second online professional workshop for UTAS-Ibri students on advanced speaking skills on July 5, 2021, through MS Teams. The mode of discussion was termed as free discussion and the participants were allowed to choose a topic of their choice to participate in the session. The discussion centred on the topic titled Education.
Dr Mohssen Amiri led the session by evaluating the perspectives of students and their English proficiency. The workshop aimed to provide a stress-free and conducive environment for students to enhance their communication and public speaking skills. In this workshop, students became conversant with familiar with various structures, phrases and relevant vocabularies of the given topic. The feedback was highly encouraging, and the students' interest in similar workshops in the future seemed evident from their repeated requests. Dr Mohssen extended his heartfelt thanks to the active members of the English Society for their rich contribution.
Interpersonal skills and personality development are an integral part of a student’s life. Young learners with strong interpersonal skills are performing team members and potential leaders. They communicate effectively with others, whether family, friends, colleagues, customers or clients. They also have better relationships at home and at work.
The ELC Students’ Activities Committee announced Professional Workshops for all the students of UTAS-Ibri in the third semester, May 2021. The workshops aimed to boost students’ interpersonal (soft) and personality development skills to prepare them for the international job market.
A considerable number of graduates fail to win the job interviews due to poor interpersonal and skills enhancing personality development. Hence, four different workshops were planned for students to be held in the third semester by Dr Mohsen, the head of the Students’ Activities Committee, who has been training similar workshops since 2016 at UTAS- Ibri.
The first workshop on Personality Development was held on 27 May 2021. The main objective of the workshop was to create awareness among young learners about the importance of personality development and the role of interpersonal skills. Dr Mohssen stated that personality development is all about building one’s capacities, nurturing talent, enhancing new skill sets, working on weaknesses, and transforming them into strengths. He further added that it is essential for students to be aware of various elements that help develop a robust personality.
During the workshop, Dr Abdulsalam Almanthari (HOC) addressed students and urged them to realise the importance of workshops with his motivational words. Excellent feedback was received from students based on the records. He thanked the President of English Society, Samah Al Ghafri, for her valuable contributions.
The Engineering Department’s Technofest is an annual event meant to involve students to test their initiative, skills, competitiveness, and mettle, as well as to give students opportunities to better themselves and earn some certificates and awards that they can proudly include in their resumes or curriculum vitae.
However, last year, due to the unexpected impact of the global pandemic on COVID, the college, by order of the Supreme Committee, opted to stop the students to come to the college and the Technofest was cancelled.
This year, when everything regarding education, training, learning, and student co-curricular and extra-curricular activities was shifted to be online, the Technofest was organised by the Engineering Department, adjusting to the present circumstances and approaches.
The Engineering Society composed of Mrs Lizette Ivy Pascual (Coordinator) and members: Dr Muraganandam, Mr Santhosh, Mr Abdul Hafeez Sajid, Mrs Nahid Al Muqrashi, and Mr Chandrashekar M.C., together with the head of department (HOD), Mr Nasser Al Shammakhi, the heads of sections (HOS), Dr V. Ilankumaran and Dr K. Elangovan, and the Competition Committee coordinators and members, all worked together, with all urgency, to make the event possible and successful.
Several competitions were planned to all be held online, such as Electrical (Proteus) Simulation, Electronics (Proteus) Simulation, Graphical (AutoCAD) Skills, and TechTrends in Electrical, Electronics, Mechanical, and Physics and Chemistry.
In addition to these competitions, the awards Best Projects for Semesters 1 and 2, 2020-2021 were also awarded for the three specialisations: Electrical, Electronics, and Mechanical, across all three levels: Diploma, Advanced Diploma, and Bachelor.
Certificates of Merit were awarded to all the competition and Best Project winners while Certificates of Participation were awarded to all the non-winners of the competitions. The Certificates, in soft copy but with digitised signatures of the of HoD, will be sent to the students via MS Teams or e-mail. Hard copies can be provided upon the request of the student.
The Math Research Group of the Information Technology Department organised a knowledge sharing seminar on Dominating Sets, Total Dominating Sets and k-Domination Polynomials on Thursday, 18 March 2021 at 9 am in the lecture hall D133, facilitated by Mr Wasim Raja and Dr Sanal Kumar, Lecturers in Mathematics, IT department, UTAS Ibri.
Dr Kumar welcomed the participants and briefed the programme essence. Mr Wasim Raja started his presentation by describing the graph theory and its applications in physical, biological, social and information systems. He demonstrated an overview of Graphs, open neighbourhood, closed neighbourhood, Dominating sets and Total Dominating sets with examples.
Dr Sanal Kumar described k-Domination Polynomials. He started his presentation by describing open k-neighbourhood and closed k-neighbourhood of a vertex in a graph. He demonstrated an overview of k-dominating sets, k-total dominating sets, k-domination polynomials, and k-total domination polynomials of graphs. Dr Kumar also discussed the recent research papers published related to the presentations and future scope.
At the end of the session Dr R. Pugalarasu, HoS Math, appreciated the efforts of Math research group and its activities. He encouraged the participants of the seminar to involve in research activities.
Feedback
Most of the attendees appreciated the programme and interacted with the speaker to get more clarity through the chat. The average score of the feedback was 4.78 out of 5.
The Research and Consultancy Committee of the Information Technology Department organised a webinar on the security of the Internet of Things (IoT). The webinar was held on 29 April 2021, at 10 am under the title “Machine Learning for IoT Security”. It was delivered by Dr Zubair Baig, a senior lecturer and security researcher at Deakin University, Australia.
Dr Zubair started the session by describing various IoT-driven platforms, including smart building, smart homes, smart cities, and vehicle-to-everything (v2x). He also described the current recent research trend categories into the smart city, including smart grid, building automation systems, unmanned aerial vehicles and smart vehicles. Moreover, he also outlines the security challenges associated with each category.
Additionally, Dr Zubair explained how artificial intelligence can help in protecting and preventing attacks on IoT systems. Afterwards, he demonstrated some attack scenarios against these systems and illustrated how machine learning could detect attacks launched on these systems.
After an informative and well-structured presentation, the guest speaker allotted some time for the questions and answers session. About 41 staff members and students attended the webinar, which lasted for one hour and concluded at 11 am. The full video recording is available online via the following link: https://cutt.ly/QnXgMK3
Feedback
Overall feedback of the event by the participant was 4.225 on the scale of 5.
The Staff Development Committee and E-learning Committee of the Engineering Department organised a presentation “Effective Utilisation of One-Note class Notebook for Online Teaching” on 3 June 2021 from 10 to 10:45 am through MS Teams. Dr Prasanna Venkatesh Dhayanithi explained in detail about the approach UTAS–Ibri follows for online teaching. Then he explained Moodle and MS-Teams. He also briefed about various tools used for annotation during online teaching.
The presenter then explained the disadvantages about other annotation software. Then he explained the advantages of One-Note Class Notebook. He explored its various features and its effective usage towards online teaching in UTAS–Ibri. He also explained its security features and its productiveness in online class conduction. The participants raised some queries, and these were clarified by the presenter. The participants felt that One-Note class Notebook features would be very useful.
The Research and Consultancy Committee of the Engineering Department organised a programme “Introduction to Satellite Communications” on 17 June 2021 at 10 am. Mr Antony Judice Alexcius Victor, lecturer, Electronics and Communication Engineering, Engineering Department, UTAS-Ibri, delivered the presentation for the benefit of staff members. He shared information about the satellite parts and Telemetry and Tracking Control (TT and C) System. During his presentation he briefed about the various applications of Satellite Communications in military, defence, and aerospace applications. He broadly covered the technical aspects behind the various types of satellites and their role in satellite orbits (GEO, MEO and LEO). He also emphasised the importance of the International Space Station (ISS), Hubble telescope and ongoing space exploration endeavours (Moon, Mars, Jupiter, Sun) etc. He also detailed the working of telecom satellites and its antennas. Finally he concluded the session by briefing the research involvement of various organisations like NASA, ESA, ISRO, Roscosmos, CNSA etc. and their milestones in this field. Research trends in satellite communication engineering such as Cubesat, Picosat, reusable launch vehicles, and the Mars mission were also briefly presented. The presentation was well received by the staff members with very good interaction. Around 35 staff members participated in this event. The RCC specially thanks Mr Feslin Anish Mon and Mr Joel Livin (external participants) for their participation and involvement in this programme.
The Staff Development Committee and E-learning Committee of the Engineering Department organised a presentation on the topic “Future of Teaching - Learning with Artificial Intelligence” on 17 June 2021, from 2 to 2:30 pm through MS-Teams. Dr K. Elangovan explained in detail about the approach of AI towards online teaching. Then he explained about the features of AI in teaching and learning. He also briefed about available AI platforms and their implications.
The presenter explained the AI adoption status in academics. The presentation also included various features of AI such as personalisation, smart content, face recognition, and their effective usage in online teaching in UTAS – Ibri. He also explained trial-and-error learning and the shift in the teacher’s role for the next generation of teaching. The participants raised some queries, and these were cleared by the presenter. The participants felt that AI plays a major role in future higher education sector.
The staff Development Committee of the Information Technology Department conducted a session about trends in information security. The webinar was presented by M Geogen, lecturer in the IT department, UTAS Ibri.
Mr Geogen welcomed the participants and briefed the topic. He focused on the changes happening in 2020, where COVID-19 impacted the world in ways no one could have predicted. As a result, organisations had to pivot and strategise, adapt and change. Organisations should be resilient enough to withstand all sorts of changes and disruptions, whether technology related or natural disasters. Focusing on the cybersecurity sector, technology evolution and new trends will shape the environment in the forthcoming year. Embracing cybersecurity trends well in advance can help organizations differentiate themselves from their competitors and gain strategic advantage.
Mr Geogen explained the main top trends in information security which include:
- Lockdowns permanently change how we conduct business
- Patch management will become a top priority for the C Suite
- Ransomware will continue to be the #1 threat
- Supply chain attacks will grow and be more targeted
- CMMC will set the tone for enforcing security standard, GDPR and CCPA spread around the world
- Security operations centre (SOC) services will evolve
- Multi-Factor Authentication use with Evolve
- The cold war of Cyber Security is Here and will Heat Up
- Mining, transportation, construction, and energy are prime targets
- Drive-by wireless attacks will impact remote workers
- Continued raise of AI and machine learning
- Increased attacks on cloud services
- Increased need for cybersecurity professionals
- Insider threats on the rise
- Rise of automotive hacking
At the end of the session Mr Geogen answered participants’ questions and appreciated the efforts of staff development committee.
Feedback
The duration of the webinar was about two hours and was attended by 16 attendees – students and staff in the university. They showed their appreciation on this webinar and how they got to know more about security trends. The average score of the feedback was 4.95 out of 5.
The workshop on “MetaVRse” was held on 20 May 2021 from 2 to 4 pm. The speakers for the event, Ms Julie Smithson and Mr Alan Smithson, gave a workshop on the technology behind the XR (mixed reality) game engine.
Ms Julie introduced the agenda of the event followed by discussing key definitions of the technology behind the engine. These included - Augmented reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR) and Mixed Reality (XR). AR can usually be accessed using a camera on a the mobile device while augmenting content over the layout. Mixed Reality uses augmented content in the real world. A sense of spatial awareness can be identified by the degrees of freedom 3 and 6.
The purpose of 3D was discussed:
- 3D for simulation
- Builds a connection
- Game-based learning that would be fun and sparks curiosity
- Interactive to communicate, train, educate and work
- Helps increase product marketing
- Training employees with product usage or simulation scenarios (learning rate increases)
- Educating students with a more fun and interactive method
- Implementing real-time analytics to gather information about user interactivity and experience
Julie highlighted the key trends in the market especially around the pandemic situation. There is a prediction of $1.5 trillion contribution to global economy by 2030.
Alan gave a complete live demonstration of the MetaVRse game engine and mentioned its online editor that can be used for building applications for fashion, education, training, virtual showroom an immersive 3D interaction, engineering, retail, entertainment, industrial with one-click publishing emphasising the live configuration setup with animative feedback.
A fully functional interactive demonstration was created to showcase the features of the engine. These features included the MetaVRse engine interface with drag and drop of scene objects such as 3D models, lights, camera, realism parameters, etc. in addition to easily plugging in animations with the content and finally publishing the content using QR code to mobile devices.
The speakers provided a questions and answers session for all where key questions were answered such as pricing, workflow, engine features and how exactly the engine fits certain case scenarios.
Feedback
The duration of the workshop was about two hours and attended by 20 attendees – students and staff form inside and outside the college. They showed their appreciation on this webinar and how they got to know more about 3D tools and MetaVRse. The average score of the feedback was 4.92 out of 5.
