Final Year Project

This project topic was selected with a lot of doubts since the domain was totally new to us. But here we are presenting our work to school children and introducing Bioinformatics to their dream goals. This was an AI showcase organized by the Multidisciplinary AI Research Center at the University of Peradeniya.

I still can remember how we opened the first short read .fastq file on my Ubuntu machine and it was slowly loading since the file was too large to handle. we were not very familiar with handling these large files. We just wanted to know how these reads are contained in the files.

While we were starting the project the department servers did not have UPS and there were frequent server downs. And it was a nightmare as we were executing time-consuming processes. Thank god once the servers were upgraded with UPS we could manage our tmux sessions and we did not want to blame much for losing our sessions on the server.

It was a good six months with metagenomes and department high-performance servers. 

A lot of discussions, since we three were already roommates. And the best part was once we got into a problem I just had to look back and Nethmi was there or to look right and Sathsarani was there. 

After all these months we learned a lot!

This was our first project with real Supervisors and our first research experience. And we were lucky enough to work with two amazing experts who became teachers to us. 

And one note, I think, again I fell in love with Engineering. 

I am always grateful to our supervisors Dr. Damayanthi Herath from our department and Dr. Vijini Mallawaarachchi from Flinders University, Australia. 

And I need to mention my teammates, Nethmi Ranasinghe and Sathsarani Aththanayaka.