3rd IEEE Bangladesh Section Student/YP/WIE Congress 2015

Organiser: IEEE UIU AND WIE Affinity Group, IEEE BD Section

Venue: United International University

Date: 13/07/2015

3rd IEEE Bangladesh Section Student/YP/WIE Congress was held on June 13, 2015 at United International University (UIU). In this congress a special session was organized by IEEE UIU and WIE Affinity Group, IEEE BD Section. 35 young female undergraduate students and 25 male students from different universities participated in the session. The main objective of the session was to inspire the students to carry on research in interdisciplinary fields and to inform the students about the female personnel who are doing outstanding research work on people with disability. Dr. Celia Shahnaz, Associate Professor, Department of EEE, BUET and Chair, WIE affinity group, IEEE BD section conducted the whole session. The session was divided into three segments: A technical talk, a brief presentation on female engineers currently working on assistive technology and an interactive session.

Technical Talk

Dr. Jesmin, Professor, Department of Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology, Dhaka University delivered a technical talk on ‘An integration of computational biology and “Omics” sciences: reveal more insights of disease mechanism’. Her research field of interest is mainly focusing on understanding the structure-function relationships of disease mechanisms. She described that by analyzing the genes related to type 2 diabetes and hypertension, a highly regulated gene-disease integrated network model has been developed that revealed the mechanism of pathogenesis of the two diseases- two major problems of Bangladesh.

The students found the topic interesting and informative. At the end of the talk, there was a question answer session. Quite a good number of students seemed truly interested in the field and asked questions to Dr. Jesmin.

Session on assistive technology

This session was conducted by Samantha Lubaba Noor, Lecturer, BRAC University. The presentation started with a brief introduction of assistive technologies available for the disable people. Then students were informed about ten female scientists who are currently working on this field of interest. She explained briefly the area of work of the scientists: some work on speech recognition software, some work on robotic systems to aid disable people while some works with the autistic children. The main focus of this 10 minute brief presentation was to let the female students know that many female engineers like them are working for the people with disability. This presentation encourages the students to do research work which will ultimately help the humanity.

Interactive Session

The theme of the interactive session was ‘Think for a change’. In this session only female members participated. It was originally like a quiz competition. The participants were asked several questions related to engineering basics. There were four levels of questions: Trivia, Jeopardy, puzzles and design. Later certificates were given to first three participants who could correctly answer maximum number of questions.