Hope for poor - Sasrutha

SOFTWARE APPLICATION FROM UNIVERSITY OF MORATUWA FOR EASY MANAGEMENT OF MICRO FINANCE - http://www.sasrutha.uom.lk/


Through Microfinance, unemployed women can be helped to generate an additional income to the family by involving themselves in home-based ventures. With the credit facilities given, they can initiate small scale businesses of producing various items for sale. However, supplying these women with credit facilities alone is not adequate to empower them as they will be confronted with problems of selling their products and also fulfilling loan liabilities on time without getting blacklisted. It will be more effective, if these women could be helped in finding potential buyers for their products. Having a system whereby these women could be informed of due dates of loan settlements etc. will facilitate smooth functioning of the microfinance setup. Another problem faced by many such organizations is the difficulty in uniform distribution of available aids to the deserving women whenever such aids are received. Going from house to house in search of defaulters daily is another daunting task for the staff of microfinance institutes.
The MashUp application “Hope for poor - Sasrutha” developed by University of Moratuwa students will assist both parties involved; microfinance institutes and the women to be empowered, in all these endeavours.

The main features of this MashUp are as follows.
1. Locating deserving women in aid distribution
2. Indication of the shortest path connecting debtors who are supposed to pay instalments each day( this will assist field officers in their collection trips)
3. Locating the defaulters and finding the reasons behind the defaults.
4. Checking on all the relevant details of clients as and when it is needed. As the information is shown graphically, it enables the staff to analyze effective loan to saving ratios.
5. Researchers and NGOs too will find this MashUp application helpful in their operations.
6. Most importantly, this MashUp “Hope for poor - Sasrutha” will support different languages based on the user preference.

For further details visit : www.sasrutha.uom.lk




Source : http://www.free-press-release.com/news/200906/1245039821.html

Hibernate

Hibernate
•Hibernate maps the Java classes to the database tables.
•It also provides the data query and retrieval facilities that significantly reduces the development time.
•Hibernate is not the best solutions for data centric applications that only uses the stored-procedures to implement the business logic in database. It is most useful with object-oriented domain modes and business logic in the Java-based middle-tier.
•Hibernate allows transparent persistence that enables the applications to switch any database.
•Hibernate can be used in Java Swing applications, Java Servlet-based applications, or J2EE applications using EJB session beans.
•Eclipse support, including a suite of Eclipse plug-ins for working with Hibernate 3.0, including mapping editor, interactive query prototyping, schema reverse engineering tool.
•Hibernate is Free under LGPL: Hibernate can be used to develop/package and distribute the applications for free.
•Hibernate is Scalable: Hibernate is very performant and due to its dual-layer architecture can be used in the clustered environments.
•Less Development Time: Hibernate reduces the development timings as it supports
•inheritance, polymorphism, composition and the Java Collection framework.
•Automatic Key Generation: Hibernate supports the automatic generation of primary key for your.


The above diagram shows that Hibernate is using the database and configuration data to provide persistence services (and persistent objects) to the application.
To use Hibernate, it is required to create Java classes that represents the table in the database and then map the instance variable in the class with the columns in the database. Then Hibernate can be used to perform operations on the database like select, insert, update and delete the records in the table. Hibernate automatically creates the query to perform these operations.

Hibernate architecture has three main components:
•Connection Management
Hibernate Connection management service provide efficient management of the database connections. Database connection is the most expensive part of interacting with the database as it requires a lot of resources of open and close the database connection.

•Transaction management:
Transaction management service provide the ability to the user to execute more than one database statements at a time.

•Object relational mapping:
Object relational mapping is technique of mapping the data representation from an object model to a relational data model. This part of the hibernate is used to select, insert, update and delete the records form the underlying table. When we pass an object to a Session.save() method, Hibernate reads the state of the variables of that object and executes the necessary query.

Hibernate is very good tool as far as object relational mapping is concern, but in terms of connection management and transaction management, it is lacking in performance and capabilities. So usually hibernate is being used with other connection management and transaction management tools. For example apache DBCP is used for connection pooling with the Hibernate.

Hibernate provides a lot of flexibility in use. It is called "Lite" architecture when we only uses the object relational mapping component. While in "Full Cream" architecture all the three component Object Relational mapping, Connection Management and Transaction Management) are used.


Source : http://www.roseindia.net/hibernate/index.shtml

Sinharaja

Sinharaja is located in south-west Sri Lanka and it is a rain forest. t is bounded on the north by the Napola Dola and Koskulana Ganga, on the south and south-west by the Maha Dola and Gin Ganga, on the west by the Kalukandawa Ela and Kudawa Ganga and on the east by an ancient footpath near Beverley Tea Estate and by the Denuwa Kanda. 6°21'-6°26'N, 80°21'-80°34'E . It’s a world heritage and most of the foreigners love to visit Sinharaja.

Source :
http://www.environmentlanka.com/sinharaja.html
http://www.srilanka.com/travel/traveldetail/TL00260

Major Researches in HCI

The study of HCI is an area something widely spread. Produce usable and safe systems as well as functional systems is the basic goal. This goal can be directly applied for the website development. Some websites are easier to use than others.

Eye movements tracking and get the use of it is now discussed among each and every people in the research areas. It is very much important to improve the Human Computer Interface systems for people who are severely paralyzed or who are unable to move or control any parts of their bodies except for their eyes. Another emerging area in the HCI is hand gesture recognition. The applications are always communicative and manipulative. Communicative is the recognition of the sign language and the manipulative is the controlling robots without any physical contact between human and computer.

Speech recognition is another emerging field in HCI. There is a big gap between a talking computer and a person. The person has the ability to understand the ideas and emotions conveyed through speech but the computer doesn’t. This is a major problem in the area of Artificial Intelligence. The ultimate goal of the speech synthesis, as with all AI applications, is to make it pass the Turing Test - a blindfolded user shouldn't be able to tell whether he is talking to a human or a machine.

Human Computer Interaction

Human Computer Interaction, or HCI, is the study, planning, and design of what happens when you and a computer work together. As its name implies, HCI consists of three parts: the user, the computer itself, and the ways they work together. Human are the end users of a program and the others in an organization or anywhere else. Computer is the machine the program runs on. Interaction can be defined as the user tells the computer what they want and computers communicate results. It can be also represented as discipline concerned with design, evaluation and implementation of interactive computer systems for human use.

The goals of HCI are to produce usable and safe systems, as well as functional systems. It is needed to produce computer systems with good usability and developers are attempting to understand the factors that determine how people use technology, develop tools and techniques to enable building suitable systems and achieve efficient, effective, and safe interaction. The system should capable to match the requirements of the user instead of changing the way that they use a system in order to fit in with it.

HCI, alternatively man–machine interaction (MMI) or computer–human interaction (CHI) is the study of interaction between people (users) and computers. It is an interdisciplinary subject, relating computer science with many other fields of study and research. Interaction between users and computers occurs at the user interface (or simply interface), which includes both software and hardware, for example, general purpose computer peripherals and large-scale mechanical systems, such as aircraft and power plants.