UCSC students win Google I/O Hackathon 2013

Tuesday, 9 July 2013 00:05 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}

In a spectacular achievement, students of the prestigious University of Colombo School of Computing (UCSC), the pioneer in the higher education sphere of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in Sri Lanka, clinched the coveted Google I/O Hackathon 2013 by winning the first and second places at the internationally-acclaimed Google I/O Extended Colombo 2013. The top honours went to UCSC student Salinda Sandaruwan Karunarathna, who won the first place, while the second place was awarded to Rasika Perera, who is also a student of UCSC.

Google I/O Extended Colombo 2013 is the first-ever Google I/O Extended event in Sri Lanka hosted by National Mobile Service Provider, Sri Lanka Telecom Mobitel was held at the Sri Lanka Foundation Institute recently. Google I/O Extended Colombo 2013 is the event organised for people who are unable to attend the live conference in San Francisco. Commenting on the remarkable achievements of the two students, UCSC Director, Professor Gihan Wikramanayake said: “During the past 25 years, our students have won many national and international awards and their work, creative performance and achievements have been duly recognised and rewarded at these important fora. This impressive achievement by the two UCSC students is the newest in the institution’s proud record of bagging honours and accolades. As the academic staff of UCSC, we are jubilant that two of our students have been able to reach the pinnacle to merit honour and recognition by Google, which has given a new dimension to the internet. “The Google I/O Extended Colombo 2013 competition is conducted annually by Google worldwide. As a part of this event, there was a contest which gave an opportunity to young participants to submit their creative work based on Android and Chrome computer language software within a short deadline. Our two students clinched the Google I/O Hackathon 2013 honours in this competition.” Google I/O is an annual developer-focused conference held by IT heavyweight Google, featuring highly technical, in-depth sessions focused on building web, mobile, and enterprise applications with Google and open web technologies such as Android, Chrome, Chrome OS, Google APIs, Google Web Toolkit, App Engine and more. In the recent past also UCSC has won a series of accolades at many competitions conducted both at the national and international level. Amongst them were the Gold accolades won at NBQSA organised by the BCS the Chartered Institute for IT to recognise and reward the most innovative quality software solutions, together with several Silver, Bronze and Merit awards. Imagine Cup which is an annual competition sponsored and hosted by Microsoft Corporation is also one that the students have won in the past. In addition, UCSC has won several ‘e-Swabhimani’ awards organised by ICTA for the most outstanding digital content creation. At APICTA international competition, UCSC has clinched the Gold and Merit awards for the best software solutions in the region. UCSC has also been recognised at Manthan and World Summit Awards. The University of Colombo School of Computing (UCSC) is the pioneer in introducing internal and external degrees in the ICT sphere in Sri Lanka. This well-known higher education institution offers diploma and higher diploma courses, internal and external undergraduate degree programmes, postgraduate and research degrees.