Top Ten ICT for the 21st Century

• ICT will become powerful extension of human beings designed to augment intelligence, learning, communications, and productivity.
  
• ICT will become intuitive—they will “learn,” “recognize,” and “know” what we want, who we are, and even what we desire.
• Computer chips will be used everywhere, and they become invisible-embedded in everything from brains and hearts, to clothes and toys.
• Computers will manage essential global systems, such as
  transportation and food production, better than humans will.
  
• Online resources will enable us to download applications on-demand via wireless access anywhere and anytime.
  
• ICT will be voice-activated, networked, video-enabled, and connected together over the Net, linked with each other and humans.
  
• Computers will have digital senses-speech, sight, smell, hearing-enabling them to communicate with humans and other machines.
  
• Neural networks and other forms of artificial intelligence will make computers both as smart as humans, and smarter for certain jobs.
  
• Human and computer evolution will converge. Synthetic intelligence will greatly enhance the next generations of humans.
  
• As computers surpass humans in intelligence, a new digital species and a new culture will evolve that is parallel to ours.

Source : globalfuturist.com

Top Trends in 2013 - IEEE

"Sustainable Development Through Effective Man-Machine Co-Existence"

1. Technical advances in disaster management (Tsunami), humanitarian de-mining and rehabilitation: This includes disaster management techniques especially applied to rescue operations in Tsunami, landslides, earthquakes & floods, robots & sensors in landmine detection & removal, navigation of mobile robots in rugged terrain, robot manipulators and control, prosthetic devices, tele-operation & remote manipulation, robotics
in physiotherapy etc. 

2. Industrial Automation and modern civilization: This will try to discuss the latest developments in industrial automation. 

3. A wired society and Tele-presence: A discussion on novel concepts in virtual reality,kansei systems, and tele-presence in the context of a networked system. It is expected to cover novel results as to how these technologies have revolutionized distributed production and marketing, education, medicine and surgery, space travel, defense etc. 

4. Intelligent robots and man-machine co-existence: This will cover new developments in intelligent robots, their hardware, learning algorithms, sensory systems, and actuators.

Source IEEE

Future Trends in Computing

1) Man machine Coexistence?
The development of ICT should be sustainable that machine shall not take the place of the man. Machines shall always be a tool for man, not other way. 

2) Artificial intelligence? (5th Gen. Computers)
Artificial intelligence (AI) studies and develops intelligent machines and software. It develops intelligents agents which perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its chances of success.

3) Ubiquitous computing? 
Ubiquitous computing is a  model of human-computer interaction in which information processing has been thoroughly integrated into everyday objects and activities.  Someone using ubiquitous computing uses devices and systems, and may not even be aware of it. The machines that fit the human environment instead of forcing humans to enter theirs. 

4) Kansei systems/Engneering? 
The development ICT products and services that operates on users emotions  feelings and needs, The devices responds users's emotional responses

5) Augmented reality
AR is a live, direct or indirect, view of a physical, real-world environment whose elements are augmented (or supplemented) by computer-generated sensory input such as sound, video, graphics or GPS data. As a result, the technology functions by enhancing one’s current perception of reality.By contrast, virtual reality replaces the real world with a simulated one. Augmentation is conventionally in real-time and in semantic context with environmental elements, such as sports scores on TV during a match. With the help of advanced technology the information about the surrounding real world of the user becomes interactive and digitally manipulable. Artificial information about the environment and its objects can be overlaid on the real world.

6.) Context Aware Computing
Context awareness is a property of mobile devices that is defined complementary to location awareness. Whereas location may determine how certain processes in a device operate, context may be applied more flexibly with mobile users, especially with users of smart phones. Context awareness originated as a term from ubiquitous computing or as so-called pervasive computing which sought to deal with linking changes in the environment with computer systems, which are otherwise static. The term has also been applied to business theory in relation to business process management issues.

7.) Quantum computing
QC developed on quantum physics where atoms are used as memory and processors. They are called quantum bits (qubits). Qubits can perform certain calculations exponentially faster than conventional computers. While traditional computers encode information into bits using binary numbers, either a 0 or 1. They can do calculations on one set of numbers at once, quantum computers encode information as a series of quantum-mechanical states can represent 1 , 4 or 16 states. It can do computations on many different numbers at once. Quantum computers are more powerful than a classical computers. Quantum computing is used in cryptography and modeling and indexing very large databases.

8). Evolutionary computing
This is a subfield of artificial intelligence that involves continuous optimization and combinational optimization problems. Evolutionary computation uses iterative progress, such as growth or development in a population. This population is then selected in a guided random search using parallel processing to achieve the desired end. Such processes are often inspired by biological mechanisms of evolution. As evolution can produce highly optimised processes and networks, it has many applications in computer science.

9). Biology Systems
is ICT applied to biomedical and biological scientific research. It focuses on complex interactions within biological systems to discover emergent properties, properties of cells, tissues and organisms functioning as a system. These typically involve metabolic networks or cell signaling networks. Genetic algorithms
A genetic algorithm (GA) is a search heuristic that follows natural evolution. It is used to generate useful solutions to search problems using techniques inspired by natural evolution, such as inheritance, mutation, selection, and crossover. Genetic algorithms find application in bioinformatics, phylogenetics, computational science, engineering, economics, chemistry, manufacturing, mathematics, physics and other fields.

11). Nature Inspired Computing (NIC) 
NIC aims to develop new computing techniques after getting ideas by observing how nature behaves in various situations to solve complex problems. Nano technologies are best examples of NIC. Nature Inspired Computing techniques are so flexible that they can be applied to wide range of problems, so adaptable that they can deal with unseen data and capable of learning, so robust that they can handle incomplete data. They have decentralized control of computational activities.

A/L ICT 2013 Model Paper MCQ Sinhala & English

• Download A/L ICT 2013 MCQ Model Paper in English
• Download A/L ICT 2013 MCQ Model Paper Answers in English
• Download A/L ICT 2013 MCQ Model Paper in Sinhala
• Download A/L ICT 2013 MCQ Model Paper Answere in Sinhala

What is CSS? Lesson #2

Embedded CSS - The <style> Element: CSS # 2
You can place CSS embedded in  head section

<head>
<style type="text/css" media="screen">
Style Rules
............
</style>
</head>


type="text/css"
Specifies the style sheet language as a content-type (MIME type).

media="screen"
Specify the device that would display the document.
Default value is all. This is optional attribute.

options =tty, tv, projection, handheld, print, braille,aural, all

CSS Overriding Rules :
The CSS defined in external style sheet file takes lowest priority.
CSS defined in <style>...</style> tags will override any external style sheet.
The inline styles takes highest priority and override other <style>...</style> tags or external styles.

CSS Measurement Units
% measurement as a percentage of enclosing element.

p {font-size: 16pt; line-height: 125%;}

cm measurement in centimeters.

div {margin-bottom: 2cm;}

em relative measurement for the height of a font in em spaces.
if you assign a font to 12pt, each "em" unit would be 12pt;
thus, 2em would be 24pt.

p {letter-spacing: 7em;}

pc measurement in picas. A pica is equivalent to 12 points; thus, there are 6 picas per inch.

p {font-size: 20pc;}

pt measurement in points. A point is defined as 1/72nd of an inch.
body {font-size: 18pt;}

px measurement in screen pixels.

p {padding: 25px;}