Moving forward in the global knowledge society

Let me start this with a popular saying,

"What worked yesterday,will not work today"

This is the key to understand how the world moves forward at a faster speed than we can think of. Today globalization has connected people across the world though innovations of science and technology. We live in a global village where knowledge has become the key of success and information has become a major part in economy

Today the world is open for more innovative ideas, more drastic technological changes and more scientific discoveries. Now people have invaded forests, desserts, mountains, oceans, sun, moon, stars, planets and the space with their miraculous discoveries relating to physics and sciences. So, the world is now a hub of knowledge or else a global knowledge society.

The question is where we as Sri Lankans stand in this arena? Sri Lanka, the perl of the Indian ocean is still immature to compete with this drastically changing world. But are we going to stay blind for the rest of the decades to come, knowing this bitter truth and keeping our voices down? I guess not. We have our resources, we have our strength, we have knowledge and we have the ultimate power to empower the mission towards achieving success in this fast moving global knowledge society. What we need is attitude and inspiration.

Dr Abdul Kalam is a person to inspire many people, especially  the youth who has the power of bring up a whole nation. From one of his recent talks on Knowledge Society we can draw some inspiration to boost ourselves and find the keys to the doors of success.

There he describes the dimensions of knowledge society where the needs of people have changed  from the basic needs to more sophisticated needs and all-around development, where people seek creative, interactive and self learning society having quality education and where most of the systems will be automated and software driven.

He gives an important message for Sri Lankans as well as to people all over the world to work with integrity and succeed with integrity. Why does he mentions integrity before any of the other important qualities that we have to nurture in ourselves in order to to fight face to face with industrialization, technology and science? It is because no matter how developed the world is, it will not have any value or quality unless people maintain ethics and human values within the society that drives us towards a civilized world where people live in peace and harmony.

Further he highlights some more important facts such as Innovation and Creativity. What does innovation have to do? Well, I think it is obvious that innovation has to do with simply everything! Innovation is the national wealth. There is this Global Competitive Index Ranking where they rank the countries according to their competitiveness in this fast moving world. According to the latest report on this, Sri Lanka is ranked at the 73rd place out of 144 countries which has participated in this ranking. Well, I think it is far too behind. This is because the growth of competitiveness is determined by innovative and creative abilities of a country and we find faults in Sri Lankans specially among the youth to come up with new innovative and creative ideas. To think out of the box, to stretch their arms and trying to reach the sky they need to be much more motivated.

And moreover we have to be knowledgeable and aware of how one or more technologies and areas of study have been integrated to produce miraculous outcomes such as bio-informatics and nano-technology which is going to replace areas related to material science, electronics and medicine. Fusion of such technologies leads a nation towards new innovations and discoveries that could rise up that nation up to the giants in technology today.

And finally above all Creative Leadership should be there to drive a working nation with brilliant, innovative ideas to climb up the ladder of success and co-ordinate with each other sharing knowledge and working as a team to fulfill their mission and inspire the generations to come.

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Life at "CSE"

"CSE", the most important turning point in my life. Why do I call it the most important? Because it just simply changed who I am, what I do and what will I be.

I should call it luck or else a miracle. Because after semester 1 examination, I was ranked as 14th in the batch and was thinking about selecting Electronics and Telecommunications Engineering simply because it was ranked as the best department in the University which most of the people above rank 100 choose to be in. But I was wrong, very wrong. Now I call CSE, the best department in the university and the best place where I should be.

Even though I just sort of made up my mind to do what I like instead of choosing what the majority chooses, now I enjoy it, enjoy life at CSE to the fullest. The work load may be tough, the leaves may be so less, I may have spend many sleepless nights having to code and cover up all the studies, yet I enjoy every bit of it since I am doing what I like.

With the word "CSE", then comes the "CSE Family", all my fellow batch mates including myself are part of a family, the CSE Family. There are no words to describe how friendly and helpful they all are. We always work together as a batch in all the events that come by and enjoy them like being in a family, enjoying others' victories and sharing sadness in losses.

I must mention and give my regards for all the lecturers, the instructors and the support staff who unlike in many of the other departments, work so closely with the students and being so friendly and interactive to support the students in all their needs. They are also like a part of the CSE Family who guide and encourage us to achieve the best out of our skills.

I cannot forget to mention few of the activities that we as a family participated and enjoyed a lot. One was the "Exuberanz" event where we first had our most wonderful day with the CSE family. There we got into groups, engaged in several energetic activities to boost up our selves and the team spirit and had fun in dressing up a team member as a princess by using newspapers, ribbons, dry leaves and flowers. Most of our friends had to dance in front of the audience for the first time in their life, including myself! We were actually having fun for the fullest. I have never had an experience like that and I call it marvelous.

And in the 2nd Semester what I enjoyed most is making up the line following, ball grabbing robot. It was one of my dreams which was inside me even before coming into the university, to build up an actual robot. We made it in groups of five members. Before start building the robot, I knew nothing about robotics. Actually none of the members in my group knew nothing about robotics. Yet we did not loose hope. We watched many you-tube videos and started by first learning to light up an LED using an arduino board. And little by little with great effort, we succeeded in building up that robot. And the happiness we had in the day that our precious robot started following the path was far beyond explaining with words.

The grooming workshops we had, and the presentation skills workshops groomed us to what we are now. Now I am able to go in front of an audience and talk without hesitation and present myself comfortably. It was a huge achieve I got by being in the CSE.

There are many more things to share, yet most importantly I would like to share one thing, one most important thing that I got by being in CSE. That is be yourself, be who you are, follow your heart and do what you love.  

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