Four faculty members, who also serve as Principal Investigators (PIs) from the Department of Electrical Engineering, have each been awarded a grant each (for approximately US$100k) from all four National Centers established by the Higher Education Commission.

The National Centers are designed to create national capacity in key emerging areas that have received much attention and focus, in recent years across the globe and where a competitive advantage for Pakistan can be created among its international industrial competitors. The four PIs from SBASSE were awarded grants after the centers ran their internal grant cycle and a competitive national competition.

Congratulations to the Department of Electrical Engineering!

We’d like to recognise the names of the awardees and their research theme.

1. Nauman Zaffar (PI), Waqar Ahmed (CoPI from ITU)

Theme: Electric vehicles penetration by leveraging big data

Funding Entity: National Center for Big Data and Cloud Computing (NCBC)

2. Zubair Khalid (PI), Muhammad Tahir, Momin Uppal

Theme: Catalyzing Industry 4.0 using Internet-of-Things testbeds

Funding Entity: National Center for Robotics & Automation (NCRA)

3. Awais bin Altaf (PI), Wala Sadeh

Theme: On-Chip Epilepsy Predictor

Funding Entity: National Center for Artificial Intelligence (NCAI)

4. Muhammad Tahir (PI), Zubair Khalid, Momin Uppal

Theme: Protecting Physical Infrastructure against Cyber-Attacks  

Funding Entity: National Center for Cyber-Security

For millennia, civilizations have found refuge around its meandering banks and in its wide basin and have sustained agriculture through its vitalizing deposits of silt and sand. Its waters have largely encouraged segregated nomadic groups to live together as a community, but the sands of time have pushed communities out and apart, creating borders and boundaries, which has not only left the Indus basin at the mercy of myopic policies but also mismanaged resource utilization, intense cultivation making the whole basin highly water stressed and lacking energy security.

Now, a team of researchers including Dr. Abubakr Muhammad from the Center for Water Informatics and Technology (WIT), SBASSE, has revealed in a paper published in ‘Nature Sustainability’, that cooperation across the borders is needed as a potential route to make sustainable development in the Indus basin possible. Using NEST, an integrated model for water-energy-land-climate systems, an analysis was done that revealed cooperation between Indus basin countries can reduce investment from US$10 billion per annum to US$2 billion per annum by the year 2050, a whopping 80% reduction in investment!

The study compared 3 models i.e., business-as-usual (BAU), sustainable development goals without transboundary cooperation (SDG) and SDG-coop, where transboundary cooperation is implemented. If no action were taken, the team discovered overexploitation of water resources in the Punjab (both Indian and Pakistani) and Sindh regions can reach a staggering 250% of the current situation, where these regions are already facing water scarcity. The team suggests optimal crop shift and increased irrigation efficiency for reduction in irrigation surface, and the shift of electrical generation from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources. The study hopes that Pakistan will be able to save US$5 billion per annum, if timely implementation on their model is exercised.

This study was published in Nature Sustainability and can be accessed here:

Vinca, A., Parkinson, S., Riahi, K. et al. Transboundary cooperation a potential route to sustainable development in the Indus basin. Nat Sustain (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-020-00654-7

The model code updated to scenarios described in this study is available here: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4037884

A video outlining the study can be accessed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gIBvFSBVs0

You must have heard parents teach their younger children that sharing is caring. Well, let’s just modify this a little bit to make it more relevant to our story: dynamic sharing is caring! But what is this all about!? Read on to find out!

We’re sure you’ve heard from that one friend about how powerful their shiny new computer is. Terms like processor, cores and multicore serve all but one purpose; to indicate speed and power of the system. However, the flaunt of a powerful system on paper renders useless when the distress of underperformance ensues. This is where the focus and attention shift from cosmetics of a product to its underlying ‘tech underbelly’, where the balance between performance and energy efficiency is the name of the game. One of the challenges in a computing system is to manage its cache effectively, so as to minimize energy utilization without affecting too much performance. Under the guidance of Dr. Muhammad Adeel Pasha (PhD advisor),Dr. Saad Zia Sheikh’s work focuses on these underlying details of a computing system.

Dr. Saad’s work mainly deals with management of shared caches, specifically devising a holistic solution for cache-aware system-level energy minimization while ensuring the schedulability for periodic tasks. Additionally, his work proposes a dynamic cache-partition schedulability analysis for multicore partitioned scheduling. This work hopes to manage the shared cache problem while also optimizing the energy consumed by the entire system.

We extend our heartiest congratulations to Dr. Saad Zia and his PhD advisor, Dr. Muhammad Adeel Pasha for this work. The following is a list of Dr. Saad’s published work.

Journal Papers:

• S. Z. Sheikh and M. A. Pasha, "Energy-Efficient Multicore Scheduling for Hard RealTime Systems: A Survey," 2018, ACM Transactions in Embedded Computing Systems (TECS) 17, 6, Article 94, 26 pages. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3291387
• S. Z. Sheikh and M. A. Pasha, " Energy-efficient Real-time Scheduling on Multicores: A Novel Approach to Model Cache Contention,” 2020, ACM Transactions in Embedded Computing Systems (TECS). 19, 4, Article 28 ,25 pages. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3399413
• S. Z. Sheikh and M. A. Pasha, "Cache-Aware Energy-Efficient Scheduling on Heterogeneous Multicores" IEEE Transactions in Parallel and Distributed Systems (TPDS)
• [Under Review]
• S. Z. Sheikh and M. A. Pasha, "Dynamic Cache-Partition Schedulability Analysis for Partitioned Scheduling on Multicore Real-Time Systems. IEEE Letters of Computer Society (LOCS) [Early Access Available: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9162466]

Conference Papers:

• S. Z. Sheikh and M. A. Pasha, "An Improved Model for System-Level Energy Minimization on Real-Time Systems," 2019, IEEE 27th International Symposium on Modeling, Analysis, and Simulation of Computer and Telecommunication Systems (MASCOTS), Rennes, FR, 2019, pp. 276-282. DOI: 10.1109/MASCOTS.2019.00039 [https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8843101]

First author of a groundbreaking paper in the Proceedings of the IEEE, Dr. Hassan Jaleel’s work describes optimal solutions to complex problems linked with multirobot architectures.

Like swarms of sardines, swimming in a magnificently choreographed movement, robots in the future may need to form functional clusters that are adaptable to a multitude of requirements ranging from transport to mapping and surveys, exploration and communication.

One of the areas of interest for Dr. Jaleel’s study is task allocation and optimizing an underlying objective for multirobot systems. His recent study discovered a connection between coverage problems and task assignment. Like sardines in sea, multirobot systems may need to learn how to effectively perform decision-making using local data, to evade a pursuing target, for example. To deal with similar scenarios, Dr. Hassan Jaleel, along with his collaborator Dr. Jeff Shamma, took a jab at the multirobot problem using two approaches.

First, local decisions and global optimisation are seen from the framework of convex optimisation which is a well-established tool in locating most suitable solutions to complex problems. Second, the task of optimisation is linked with recurrent incidents of learning, framed in the language of games, where under prescribed rules and multiple players the best configuration is achieved by repetitive learning process between players.

The hope is that this work can serve large scale societal purpose and sets the stage for applying control and game theory to multiple scenarios. We congratulate Dr. Hassan Jaleel on having his paper published in this prestigious journal.

Citation

H. Jaleel and J. S. Shamma, "Distributed Optimisation for Robot Networks: From Real-Time Convex Optimisatiofn to Game-Theoretic Self-Organisation," in Proceedings of the IEEE, vol. 108, no. 11, pp. 1953-1967, Nov. 2020, doi: 10.1109/JPROC.2020.3028295.