Browsing by Author "Jayasena, S"

Now showing 1 - 20 of 72

item: Thesis-Abstract
A Near real time system to determine a cost-effective IDD traffic routing plan
Fernando, MAAC; Jayasena, S
International telecommunication has become a very important sector in the present day communication. IDD traffic is one of the main sources of revenue for national telecommunication service providers (Telcos). Hence, it has to be managed properly and driven effectively to gain maximum profit./ Telco’s usually deal with multiple international operators (carriers) e.g. SingTel, Telstra, in order to use latter's networks for international traffic. These carriers offer different charging structures which vary with the time, volume and the destination. Most Telcos incur high costs due to lack of a proper system to analyse and forecast an optimized IDD routing plan./ Therefore, a system which is capable of producing a cost-effective routing plan by analyzing the current IDD usage pattern and the traffic cost would be much beneficial for all Telco’s. The objective of this research work is to find a suitable methodology for Telcos to produce a cost-effective routing plan for the IDD traffic in near real time. In our approach, the main tasks are, • Forecasting the IDD traffic pattern to each destination • Determining the optimized routing plan. Forecasting the future traffic was based on past traffic, current IDD traffic trend and the subscriber growth rate of Telcos. A Genetic Algorithm (GA) was used to obtain the optimized routing plan. Dynamic behavior of the problem domain was successfully addressed in the GA structure./ The GA parameters, population size, number of generations and the GA operations (crossover, mutation and reproduction) ratio were determined experimentally. Experimental results show that our solution is capable of producing a cost-effective routing plan in near-real-time which reduces the cost by 30% to 50% against the manual routing plan. Our solution could be used by national Telco’s to save significant costs in the international traffic and to pass some of that cost savings to their customers.
item: Conference-Extended-Abstract
A New prosodic phrasing model for sinhala language
(2010) Bandara, WMC; Lakmal, VMS; Liyanagama, TD; Bulathsinghala, SV; Dias, G; Jayasena, S
This paper describes a new model of predicting prosodic phrase breaks in Sinhala language in order to improve the quality of the existing ITS Sinhala voices. In a Text To Speech (TTS) system, quality of the synthetic voice is mainly dependent on, how well its prosodic model is implemented The prosodic model adjusts the phrasing and the pitch of the voice while applying suitable durations and tones for words and diphones. Out of these, phrasing and pitch of the voice carries much importance since appropriate phrase breaking helps to clearly understand the synthesis voice. In a real world scenario, when we speak a sentence, we automatically divide it to small segments and apply pauses at those breaks. Also the pitch of the voice gets lowered near a break and gels increased in the other segments automatically. But in a ITS system, we do not have that advantage and therefore need to be precised with the phrase breaks. Otherwise it will create wrong meanings as well as producing unnatural speech.
item: Thesis-Abstract
A Process oriented approach to alleviate service delivery issues in the Sri Lankan private sector hospitals : an information systems perspective
Pereira, NPDSS; Jayasena, S
The growth of the Sri Lankan healthcare sector is a necessity at this stage due to an increasingly ageing community and a significant increase in non-communicable diseases. Despite many regulations that given the sector, it continues to be inundated with many problems in relation to delivery of healthcare services./ Although the state is a prominent player in the industry, private sector healthcare facilities provide curative out patitent care to 60% of the population in the country. The World Health Organisation strategic agenda, Strategic Framework for Health Development in Sri Lanka as well as the Health Master Plan had highlighted the necessity of Information Systems for improved service delivery in the sector./ The existing Information Systems with it's administrative and financial bias has failed to add value in the interaction between the healthcare worker and the patient. The study investigates the possible evolution of the existing Healthcare Information Systems by analyzing the process orientation of the organization, IT investment ,IT infrastructure and the external environment of the healthcare institute./ This qualitative study provides a framework as well as a set of recommendations for a process oriented approach to alleviate service delivery issues in the Sri Lankan private sector hospitals.
item: Thesis-Full-text
Accelerated SMPP decoder implementation based on GPU
(2017) Weerasinghe, PSA; Jayasena, S
Graphic processing unit (GPU) provides a low-cost but powerful hardware platform for implementing massively parallel high performance systems. The capabilities of GPUs have been used to provide fast and low cost solutions in areas such as machine learning, complex simulations such as global warming and genetic engineering and network traffic processing. Our research is focused on using GPUs to accelerate the decoding process of the Short Message Peer to Peer (SMPP) protocol. SMPP protocol is used to exchange Short Messages between Short Message Service Centers (SMSCs) and TCP/IP based applications. From the point of view of a user, a SMS taking few seconds is acceptable and therefore a SMSC is mostly focused on achieving a higher throughput than a low per packet latency. We have developed a SMPP decoder library in C with GPU support. It supports both CPU based and GPU based decoding. The library also includes two primary APIs. The first API is for general usage by any C based application and the second API could be used by Java Native Interface (JNI) based application. We have evaluated the performance of the library in both CPU and GPU modes and compared it with a SMPP server based on Cloudhopper, a Java implementation of SMPP protocol. The evaluation shows around five times throughput gain in GPU mode over both Java and C based CPU modes.
item: Thesis-Abstract
An Analysis of challenges & constraints faced by the business to consumer (B2C) e-commerce retail industry in Sri Lanka
Lekamge, DS; Jayasena, S
Electronic commerce is an extensively discussed topic worldwide. Over the years, its popularity increased through many of the success cases. Consumers found it as a convenient, efficient and less time-consuming method to purchase products. Sri Lanka is rather new to the concept of electronic commerce, especially in the Retail industry. Currently few sellers provide purchasing online. However, the revenues generated by these online sales are insignificant compared to the sales generated at its relevant physical store. Though there have been an increase of online sales over the years, still it has not reached a up to a significant level. Therefore, this study is to analyze the reasons behind low B2C e-commerce penetration. The main objective of this research is to investigate the reasons that prevent consumers from purchasing online. Further, it investigates the challenges and constraints faced by the organizations that are already into B2C e-commerce and to identify the type of products that has a higher demand to be sold online in the local context. A conceptual framework was designed which consisted of seven independent variables and one dependent variable the "B2C e-commerce usage". Through the use of a questionnaire, data was gathered for these variables. As local sites have consumers living within Sri Lanka and consumers living overseas, two separate questionnaires were prepared to match each segment. Several leading online sellers were interviewed to gather data from the organizations point of view. The research findings revealed that internet-usage and IT literacy rate could no longer be considered as a challenge or constraint towards the usage of e-commerce. While credit card usage, security & trust and user-friendliness remains as constraints, guarantee of delivery and reputation of the seller seems to be challenges to increase online sales.
item: Thesis-Abstract
An Empirical study of management and perception of global virtual software teams
Pathiranage, ISJ; Jayasena, S
Global virtual software teams are becoming an inevitable aspect of the modern competitive information technology marketplace and software development environments as they provide access to low cost and high expert resources while eliminating the time space barriers significantly. Team members are no longer located at a same place and they only communicate via electronic means. They belong to different cultures, time zones and have diverse work ethics, attitudes and career goals, still work towards achieving the common objectives of the team. This research attempted to identify challenges when managing virtual software teams in Sri Lankan context and to investigate how those challenges correlate with success of team leadership. Apart from that, IT professionals' perceptions regarding global virtual software teams have also been examined. The research design included a combination of qualitative and quantitative approaches. A sample of 45 IT professionals was selected and the correlation analysis was performed using Pearson's product-moment correlation coefficient with two-tailed test. Prior to this a pilot study was conducted in order to identify the variables that should be included in the conceptual framework and developing hypotheses. The physical distance among team members of virtual teams amplifies the common challenges belonging to conventional face-to-face teams. Yet many people perceived these challenges as an interesting aspect. This study indicates that dealing with cultural differences, developing trust and relationships, dealing with different time zones and holiday, achieving cohesive team work, motivating distance team member, individual performance monitoring and effective requirement elicitation should be given a 'high priority and attention when managing a virtual software team in order to be a successful team leader.
item: Thesis-Abstract
Analysis of the dearth of IT professionals to work as application support engineers in Sri Lanka
Dharmawardhana, LT; Jayasena, S
Sri Lanka has become one of the best IT knowledge bases to which most organizations worldwide outsource software projects. For any IT company that undertakes such projects, providing after sale support to the customers is also as important as developing and implementing the systems. Thus it will be beneficial to see how the Sri Lankan IT industry can improve their customer support service which will ultimately affect the customer satisfaction. This research focuses on the 'perception' that IT professionals have regarding customer support and the level of job 'satisfaction' the present support engineers have regarding their job. This study is conducted by gathering data from Sri Lankan support engineers and other engineers (called non-support engineers) who are working in IT companies that provide support to their customers. The author has analyzed the 'job perception' through two questionnaires, one given to support engineers and the other to non-support engineers. Perception is measured through support engineers' and non-support engineers' feelings regarding the recognition of the job combined with the level of awareness among non-support engineers towards the job. Job satisfaction is analyzed from the data gathered by support engineers through a questionnaire distributed to them. Satisfaction of the job is measured by analyzing the satisfaction of working on shift / roster basis, satisfaction of the job title and the satisfaction of the salary compared to other IT professions in the Sri Lankan IT industry. According to the results of the analysis, the author has identified with 95% confidence level that the job perception of support engineers is low or not good. The perception of non-support engineers towards the job is also identified as not good. The job satisfaction that the current support engineers pursue in terms of shift work is good. However the title and the salary of support engineers should be improved to make the support engineers feel satisfied with their job.
item: Thesis-Abstract
Analysis of the relationship between ICT and availability / productivity of container handling equipment in the port of Colombo
De Silva, EGSD; Jayasena, S
In the Port of Colombo 65% of the container business depends on transshipment. As such it is very important to understand the key factors that promote customer satisfaction and productivity, because unsatisfied customers may change their operational base for transshipment to other more attractive ports or terminals in the region following the recent developments in the ports in the Indian subcontinent./ The completion of operations for a container vessel within a planned period is one of the prime requirements that the customer expects from the terminal operators, which otherwise will cost them heavy expenditure. Two main reasons for the failure to achieve the above objective are the non-availability of container handling cranes, which may occur suddenly in the midst of operations, and low productivity resulting from various other causes such as breakdowns or faults, accidents, planning problems, weather conditions and so on. In this scenario, ICT systems used in container- handling equipment play a major role, since ICT systems installed in the crane will help to solve many of the problems mentioned above./ In this research the main objectives are to find out the relationship between the ICT level used in container handling cranes and the availability of such cranes and also how ICT systems are used to improve productivity of the quay cranes. The results of the research will help to take strategic decisions on the future procurement of cargo handling equipment. Further this will also give an indication for the replacement of old cranes with state of the art new equipment./ Most of the developed ports in the world use ICT systems in almost every segment in the cargo export and import processes and they continue to invest on further improvements. But we are still reluctant to use, and less prepared for it, although customers demand more from the seaports and the terminal operators. The results of the research show that the use of ICT systems has a big contribution to make to wards the availability and productivity of quay cranes and henc customer satisfaction.
item: Thesis-Full-text
Analyzing knowledge management capabilities of software development companies in Sri Lanka
Madapathage, AP; Jayasena, S; Madapathage, A.P. (2007). Analyzing knowledge management capabilities of software development companies in Sri Lanka [Master's theses, University of Moratuwa]. Institutional Repository University of Moratuwa. http://dl.lib.mrt.ac.lk/handle/123/588
Knowledge management (KM) has been the subject of much discussion over the past decade. Organizations have realized that they will not survive in the modern knowledge era unless they have a strategy for managing and leveraging value from their intellectual assets, and many KM lifecycles and strategies have been proposed. The term "Knowledge Management" has been applied to a very broad spectrum of activities designed to manage, exchange and create or enhance intellectual assets within an organization./ Software development is a mental exercise. Software is produced by human thoughts that cannot be controlled, gathered or accumulated in the same ways as with physical goods. Knowledge work is fundamentally different in character from physical labor. The thoughts will make the knowledge, which is the main asset for any software development company. Hence the way it is managed is of crucial importance towards avoiding the repetition of mistakes and effective use of existing know-how in value addition process. The capability to do so by individual companies will decide their survival on the competitive market. As an emerging industry in Sri Lanka, software companies should focus on the knowledge management capability./ This dissertation tries to analyze the capability of knowledge management of software development companies in four different aspects. Those are management focus, staff perception and attitude, internal process and available infrastructure. We wish to analyze those aspects in Sri Lankan context and give guidelines on managing the knowledge asset. The capability index is derived, after gathering the importance of each aspect by questioning the industry people. Also the current level of capability is assessed, with the use of a derived scale; hence it, gives an industry wide analysis.
item: Conference-Full-text
Ananya - a named-entity-recognition (ner) system for sinhala language
(IEEE, 2016-04) Manamini, SAPM; Ahamed, AF; Rajapakshe, RAEC; Reemal, GHA; Jayasena, S; Dias, GV; Ranathunga, S; Jayasekara, AGBP; Bandara, HMND; Amarasinghe, YWR
Named-Entity-Recognition (NER) is one of the major tasks under Natural Language Processing, which is widely used in the fields of Computer Science and Computational Linguistics. However, the amount of prior research done on NER for Sinhala is very minimal. In this paper, we present data-driven techniques to detect Named Entities in Sinhala text, with the use of Conditional Random Fields (CRF) and Maximum Entropy (ME) statistical modeling methods. Results obtained from experiments indicate that CRF, which provided the highest accuracy for the same task for other languages outperforms ME in Sinhala NER as well. Furthermore, we identify different linguistic features such as orthographic word level and contextual information that are effective with both CRF and ME Algorithms.
item: Thesis-Abstract
Application of information technology in container terminals in Sri Lanka
Sumanasekera, PU; Jayasena, S
Applications of Information Technology in the cargo handling business in general and the container shipping industry in particular are numerous and have grown rapidly in recent past. Software systems for cargo manifesting, operation planning, container tracking ,plant operation and billing for the services provided have been developed by reputed software companies and such systems are in place in many leading ports throughout the world.// The Port of Colombo started its container operation business as far back as 1979 and it is a pioneer in the Asian region. The Port of Colombo has two container terminal operators, namely Jaya Container Terminal, which is owned and operated by the Sri Lanka Ports Authority and the South Asia Gateway Terrninal, which is owned by a consortium of P& 0 Shipping Line, John Keells Holdings and few other private organizations. Port of Colombo has maintained prominent rank (between 21st and 38th in the world) on the basis of container volume handled annually.// As a result of continuous development works carried out in the past with the assistance of the Japanese Government, total revenue of the Port of Colombo has increased from a mere Rs. 650 million in 1979 (about US$ 26 million at 1979 rate) to Rs. 16 billion at2003 (about US $ 160 million at today's rates) and this makes SLPA the most profitable institution in Sri Lanka. Almost all major container shipping lines use the Port of Colombo facilities; few examples, Mearsk Sealand Shipping Line (world largest container shipping line), P & 0 Shipping Line, Evergreen Shipping Line Terminal Operators today face challenges in providing speedy services requested by shipping lines that operate very large ships with capacity more than 8,000 TEUs (twenty foot equivalent units). Few examples are, limitations of infrastructure (e.g. depth of the port), providing quay cranes, which can handle many rows of containers across the ship ,and providing high berth productivity levels (in moves per hour), so that ship will stay a short time in the port. To provide those service requirements container terminals have to invest on information technology systems such as automated container location and positioning, wireless LAN, efficient yard operation software etc.// The Port of Colombo depends on transshipment containers to maintain its current status as a recognized "Mega Container Port". But it has to face stiff competition form regional ports which are developing fast while Port of Colombo development work stagnating due to scarcity of capital. Also due to slow pace of development work, Port of Colombo finds that, it is very difficult to provide service levels requested by shipping lines.// One way to improve service levels is by using an efficient information system and it will help to increase current low level of yard utilization and vessel productivity levels to industry norm levels. This will help to increasing annual throughput capacity of the JCT from current 1.7 millionTEUst2.8millionTEUs.Inaddition, such a system can support better flow of information with clients (e.g. using industry standard ED messages), and online information to the shipping community. Also this will help to increase the satisfaction level of the shipping community, which is at a low ebb now.
item: Thesis-Abstract
Application of information technology in container terminals in Sri Lanka
(2014-08-06) Sumanasekera, PU; Jayasena, S
Applications of Information Technology in the cargo handling business in general and the container shipping industry in particular are numerous and have grown rapidly in recent past. Software systems for cargo manifesting, operation planning, container tracking, plant operation and billing for the services provided have been developed by reputed software companies and such systems are in place in many leading ports throughout the world. The Port of Colombo started its container operation business as far back as 1979 and it is a pioneer in the Asian region. The Port of Colombo has two container terminal operators, namely Jaya Container Terminal, which is owned and operated by the Sri Lanka Ports Authority and the South Asia Gateway Terminal, which is owned by a consortium of P & O Shipping Line, John Keells Holdings and few other private organizations. Port of Colombo has maintained prominent rank (between 2 1 s t and 3 8 t h in the world) on the basis of container volume handled annually. As a result of continuous development works carried out in the past with the assistance of the Japanese Government, total revenue of the Port of Colombo has increased from a mere Rs. 650 million in 1979 (about US$ 26 million at 1979 rate) to Rs. 16 billion at 2003 (about US $ 160 million at today's rates) and this makes SLPA the most profitable institution in Sri Lanka. Almost all major container shipping lines use the Port of Colombo facilities; few examples, Mearsk Sealand Shipping Line (world largest container shipping line), P & O Shipping Line, Evergreen Shipping Line. Terminal Operators today face challenges in providing speedy services requested by shipping lines that operate very large ships with capacity more than 8,000 TEUs (twenty foot equivalent units). Few examples are, limitations of infrastructure (e.g. depth of the port), providing quay cranes, which can handle many rows of containers across the ship, and providing high berth productivity levels (in moves per hour), so that ship will stay a short time in the port. To provide those service requirements container terminals have to invest on information technology systems such as automated container location and positioning, wireless LAN, efficient yard operation software etc. The Port of Colombo depends on transhipment containers to maintain its current status as a recognised "Mega Container Port". But it has to face stiff competition form regional ports which are developing fast while Port of Colombo development work stagnating due to scarcity of capital. Also due to slow pace of development work, Port of Colombo finds that, it is very difficult to provide service levels requested by shipping lines. One way to improve service levels is by using an efficient information system and it will help to increase current low level of yard utilisation and vessel productivity levels to industry norm levels. This will help to increasing annual throughput capacity of the JCT from current 1.7 million TEUs to 2.8 million TEUs. In addition, such a system can support better flow of information with clients (e.g. using industry standard EDI messages), and online information to the shipping community. Also this will help to increase the satisfaction level of the shipping community, which is at a low ebb now.
item: Thesis-Full-text
Auto-tuning multi-tiered application for performance
Fernando, V; Jayasena, S
Auto-Tuning Multi Tiered Applications for Performance With the widespread use of cluster-based environments, getting the maximum possible performance from multi-tiered web applications becomes an important task. The large numbers of configurable parameters in such environments and applications, however, makes manual performance tuning (i.e., searching for and identifying key parameters that affect performance and optimal values for those parameters) extremely difficult, if not virtually impossible. The problem becomes further complicated because the key parameters and/or their optimal values will vary across environments, applications and workloads. In this work, we explore the autotuning approach, which is generally used to automatically tune the performance of programs in traditional HPC settings, to tune multi-tiered web applications. Our approach is based on OpenTuner, a framework used to build auto-tuners to search through a configuration space for an optimal configuration. Even for this autotuning approach, the wide variations and the dynamic nature in the runtime environment, such as network congestion, variations in demand, possible node failures and changes in workloads pose a significant challenge. In this work, we explore offline and online tuning techniques to overcome the challenges of autotuning multi-tiered applications. We present results of offline autotuning experiments that tuned benchmark applications for multiple performance goals. We show that 20% - 25% improvements in response time and throughput can be achieved through our offline autotuning approach. We present a way of reducing the tuning time by pruning the configuration space. We identify the parameters in web servers that contribute most to performance. We also show that different performance goals can lead to differences in configurations and discuss the shortcomings of offline autotuning methods. We also take a look at online tuning methods and show that online tuning of multi-tiered applications is feasible.
item: Article-Abstract
Automatic Creation of a Sentence Aligned Sinhala-Tamil Parallel Corpus
Hameed, RA; Pathirennehelage, N; Ihalapathirana, A; Mohamed, MZ; Ranathunga, VSD; Jayasena, S; Dias, G; Fernando, S
A sentence aligned parallel corpus is an important prerequisite in statistical machine translation. However, manual creation of such a parallel corpus is time consuming, and requires experts fluent in both languages. Automatic creation of a sentence aligned parallel corpus using parallel text is the solution to this problem. In this paper, we present the first ever empirical evaluation carried out to identify the best method to automatically create a sentence aligned Sinhala-Tamil parallel corpus. Annual reports from Sri Lankan government institutions were used as the parallel text for aligning. Despite both Sinhala and Tamil being under-resourced languages, we were able to achieve an F-score value of 0.791 using a hybrid approach that makes use of a bilingual dictionary.
item: Conference-Abstract
Automatic creation of a word aligned Sinhala-Tamil parallel corpus
(2017) Mohamed, MZ; Ihalapathirana, A; Hameed, RA; Pathirennehelage, N; Ranathunga, S; Jayasena, S; Dias, G
A parallel corpus aligned at both sentence and word level is an important prerequisite in statistical machine translation. However, manual creation of such a parallel corpus is time consuming, and requires experts fluent in both languages. This paper presents the first ever empirical evaluation carried out to identify the best unsupervised word alignment technique for Sinhala and Tamil. It also presents a novel approach that combines the output of individual aligners, which outperforms the solitary use of these aligners. Sentence aligned parallel text from annual reports and letters of Sri Lankan Government institutions, and order papers from the Parliament of Sri Lanka were used in the evaluation.
item: Conference-Full-text
Bilingual lexical induction for sinhala-english using cross lingual embedding spaces
(IEEE, 2021-07) Liyanage, A; Ranathunga, S; Jayasena, S; Adhikariwatte, W; Rathnayake, M; Hemachandra, K
Bilingual lexicons are an important resource in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Such resources are scarce for Low Resource languages (LRLs) such as Sinhala. However, research on Bilingual Lexical Induction (BLI) on low resource settings is limited. This paper presents the first-ever implementation of BLI for the Sinhala-English language pair. Following the recently introduced VecMap model, we map the vectors of words belonging to both Sinhala and English into a shared vector space and measure the Cross Lingual (CL) similarity between the words. The closest English word for a given Sinhala word in this CL vector space is taken as the corresponding similar word. Currently, there is no detailed evaluation with respect to the size and the nature of the dataset used to create the word vectors, type of the evaluation dictionary, or the technique used to create the word vectors. This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of how these factors affect BLI for Sinhala and English languages and shows that the BLI results have a heavy dependency on these factors.
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Comprehensive Part-Of-Speech Tag Set and SVM Based POS Tagger for Sinhala
Fernando, S; Ranathunga, S; Jayasena, S; Dias, G
This paper presents a new comprehensive multi-level Part-Of-Speech tag set and a Support Vector Machine based Part-Of-Speech tagger for the Sinhala language. The currently available tag set for Sinhala has two limitations: the unavailability of tags to represent some word classes and the lack of tags to capture inflection based grammatical variations of words. The new tag set, presented in this paper overcomes both of these limitations. The accuracy of available Sinhala Part-Of-Speech taggers, which are based on Hidden Markov Models, still falls far behind state of the art. Our Support Vector Machine based tagger achieved an overall accuracy of 84.68% with 59.86% accuracy for unknown words and 87.12% for known words, when the test set contains 10% of unknown words.
item: Thesis-Full-text
Cost impact of " security of payment act" to the Sri Lankan construction supply chain
Priyadarshani, GHK; Jayasena, S
Construction industry supply chain is a pyramid. Due to its complexity of contracting and sub-contracting, the construction industry is set apart from other industries. For a large construction project, this pyramid can have number of different levels below the sub-contractors also as sub-sub- contractors and so forth down the pyramid. As such, a delay in payment from the employer will freezes up the flow of funds below level of the pyramid. The Act of Security of Payment comes in to action in other countries to prohibit contingent payment clauses in contracts, to minimize unnecessary delays in progress payments and then protect the downstream payments. Accordingly, it has been identified that such Act would be very important to be implemented in Sri Lankan construction context also due to that the same situation is being undergone by Sri Lankan industry too. Since the importance of Act has already been identified, it was decided to identify the potential provisions of a security payment act, identify the parties in the construction supply chain affected by the Act and synthesize the nature of potential cost impact to each party under different situations subjected to the Act. Accordingly, a comprehensive literature survey was carried out to identify the potential provisions of the Act and parties affected by the Act. In order to synthesize the cost impact to each identified party, a semi structured interview was carried out to identify the current grounded phenomenon of payment issues. The professionals were selected from the identified group of levels of employers, main contractors, sub-contractors and suppliers to conduct the interviews. They were mainly questioned about financing the gap in between the progress payment request and receipt of money, delay of payments, back to back payment clauses, prompt payments and Security Payment Act. It was identified through the interviews that no additional premium is added to the contract price in order to finance the payment gaps. But according to the nature of the employer, markup will be adjusted concerning the past experiences with that particular employer. Delay payments have been a common issue in the industry and back to back payment clauses are usually included in sub contracts due to this. Therefore, actually, there is a real request emerged from the industry to take necessary actions to minimize this issue. Further, the potential cost impact to the each party was evaluated under the situations come across under the Act as identified in literature survey. It was recognized that the there is a potential positive cost impact to the contractors, sub-contractors and suppliers who are down below the pyramid and though initially the employer has to bare additional cost, the system itself get balanced once the Act implemented resulting positive cost impact to the employer too.
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Course editor : web authoring tool for an e-learning system
Pushpakumara, H; Jayasena, S
MathML is a new effective public standard language for encoding mathematical expressions on the web. In order to foster the adoption of MathML in World Wide Web, MathML software needs to be freely available for users. MathML software products which exist today are very limited and most of the time shipped as an expensive commercial product which hinds the use of MathML by wide computer user community./ The Goal of this current research is to implement an open source, easy to use web authoring tool which helps teachers in creating scientific course materials with mathematical content. The Proposed tool can directly create the web content from MS Word documents. This avoids rather than spending time, energy and money in using complicated web authoring tools. This generated web content with MathML is published in a browser in a neutral way allowing a large audience to be reached./ The generated content is also conforms to the SCORM (Shareable Content Object Reference Model) specification, allowing them to be easily deployed in SCORM compliant Learning Management Systems
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Critical issues in construction joint ventures in Sri Lanka
Chamara, HWL; Jayasena, S
Joint venture (JV) has become a common business form for construction contractors in undertaking large construction projects worldwide. However, most of studies found that construction joint ventures (CJVs) can be failed due to several issues such as, unclear partner roles, unequal risk sharing, misunderstanding of practices etc. Hence, a necessity was emerged to conduct this research with the purpose of determining the issues which are critical for construction joint ventures in Sri Lanka in order to propose probable attributes to overcome. Accordingly, thirty six issues in CJVs were determined though literature review and preliminary survey. The identified factors were evaluated by conducting a questionnaire survey with respect to the quantitative approach. Thus, the survey was conducted among the forty professionals who are engaged in CJVs in Sri Lanka and having a detailed knowledge and more than five (05) years of experience in the relevant field. The data collected through survey was analysed by using Mean Weighted Rating, Relative Importance Index and Box plot techniques to identify the issues which are critical in CJVs in Sri Lanka. As the results denoted, twenty five critical issues were determined. Among them, not having formal guideline for partner selection and entering to JVs based only on qualification/resources issues were obtained highest rankings. Facing unavoidable events, leakage of information to outside parties and failures with respect to their political, social, legal and government procedures and no proper way to deal with additional installments were identified as least critical issues. Further verifications obtained through the visualization of box plots showed that not having formal guideline for partner selection has obtained the top ranking issue in CJVs in Sri Lanka with a high level of agreement among the survey respondents. Finally, the probable strategies were proposed to overcome the critical issues in CJVs in Sri Lanka. As the main implication of this research, the evaluation of issues of CJVs and the proposed strategies can be used by industry practitioners as a basis to evaluate the current status of CJV projects in order to initiate the successful CJVs in Sri Lanka.