Vijini Mallawaarachchi

The 7th International Conference on Software and Computer Applications (ICSCA) was held during February 8th-10th, 2018 in Kuantan, Malaysia. Our research paper titled “Random Forest Classifier based Scheduler Optimization for Search Engine Web Crawlers” was accepted under the “Computer Science and Information Communication” session. This was the first time I attended an international research conference to present my team’s work and I am grateful for the chance I got to attend ICSCA 2018. I have been working in the field of Web searching and information discovery for the past year as my team’s final year undergraduate project and this paper was compiled as part of it. I was having mixed feelings of joy and anxiousness as this was my first ever conference presentation and I had to take the responsibility of representing my entire team. With the support from ACM-W, I was looking forward to travel to Malaysia and attend the conference. Despite the mixed feelings, I was able to make the stay at Malaysia one of the most joyous and exciting memories I have ever had. Being a female undergraduate and the youngest presenter in my session made me very nervous, but I presented my paper well and was able to win the best oral presentation certificate of the “Computer Science and Information Communication” session at ICSCA 2018. This made me very proud as I was able to bring glory to my country and university as well from my very first conference experience. During the three-days stay, I got the chance to meet many inspiring individuals from different countries all over Asia, who were passionate in computer science research. It was interesting to know about the projects from various areas such as algorithm design and optimization, data analysis, data mining, software design, image and signal processing, software testing and management, knowledge engineering and intelligent teaching systems, that had been undertaken to develop and improve computer science applications in different fields such as medicine, security, economics, education and manufacturing engineering. I made new friends from different countries, learnt a lot about their work and shared my work with them as well. I got the chance to talk with Prof. Thanh van Do from Telenor & Oslo Akershus University College, Norway, who was the chair of my session and he was interested in my team’s work. Moreover, the conference experience was not only a fortune of knowledge, but also an opportunity to enjoy the culture of Malaysia as well. I got the chance to visit many places in Kuantan and meet locals. Looking back at the experience, I believe that attending ICSCA 2018 was definitely a great first step into the computer science research community. The experience I gained by this conference participation was immensely helpful in continuing my ongoing research work.