The 1st st International Electrical Engineering Congress (IEEC) was held at IEP Building, Karachi on 13th and 14th May. This was an important occasion for me since my paper titled “A Smart Safety Gadget for Avoiding Accidents in Warehouse Environment” had been accepted for publication in the proceedings and I was invited for a poster presentation at the conference.
The paper describes the design and implementation of a safety gadget prototype for warehouse workers. In warehouses many accidents are caused by vehicles and machines running over the worker. The threatened worker has no reliable way of communicating with the vehicle operator or stopping it in case it is an automated vehicle or machine. We alleviate this problem by designing a wireless system which the threatened worker can activate by the press of a button. Once pressed, the gadget will stop all the vehicles and machines within a close proximity of the worker and will also send an alert message to nearby workers so that they may come to help. Some more details can be found here.
This was my first experience at an academic conference. I was accompanied by fellow student Inshaluddin who was also presenting his paper and Engr. Laeeq uz Zaman who had worked on the project with me and also was the co-author.
Neither Inshal nor I knew the way to conference venue. Laeeq bhai had to be guide, I rode with him and Inshal followed him in his car. Finding the building took some time and we reached the conference venue a little late. Fortunately, we had not missed any of the good things and were shown the way to poster presentation room by volunteers.
Tea was served after a few minutes and after that the conference took off according to schedule. I and Laeeq bhai presented our work before visitors from academia and industry. Our work and prototype was applauded by the all visitors. Most visitors with industrial background emphasized the need for such a system and informed us of many new and interesting use cases. We also met with authors and students presenting their work at the conference. The number of student papers and participants was a good indicator that students are now realizing the importance of quality published work.
Not long before lunch we got our conference bag with souvenirs. The poster presentation session was scheduled to end at 3.30pm. All the authors were presented with honorary certificate and shield at the end of session. After that it was time for oral presentation session in which most PhD students were presenting their work. We could only attend a few presentations because Laeeq bhai had to go owing to some problem.
It was a good learning experience. To be able to present, explain and defend your work before experts from industry and academia is indeed a good sign. I also got to learn about the problems people in research are working on and trends in industry. I must also acknowledge the support and encouragement of my supervisor Dr Muhammad Khurram who helped make this project a reality.
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