Have you ever used filters on your Snapchat? Of course, you have! We love filters that can make us look older, younger, or just outright funny. However, a sinister extension to this technology, appropriately named ‘deepfake’, can recreate anyone’s voice and video with unprecedented accuracy and can be used to project fake identities of influential people to create anarchy, distrust and political polarisation. Bad, bad stuff! 

But worry not – Team LUMS to the rescue! Dr. Ayesha Ali from the LUMS Economics Department and Dr. Ihsan Ayyub Qazi and Dr. Agha Ali Raza from Computer Science, have just won the prestigious Facebook Research Award that puts us in the right spot to develop and test our in-house deepfake-busting technology. 

This year Facebook received over 1,000 proposals from 600 institutions and 77 countries around the world and only 25 proposals were selected for funding. This is the second time in a row that our Faculty have won this highly selective award and will provide funding of USD 90,000 to ensure everyone’s identities are protected and our society is safe from cyber criminals.

The original announcement from Facebook can be seen here: https://bit.ly/2XIOo9e

The recipients of the award describe, "Our work aims to answer two questions: (i) Among populations with low digital literacy, how do users perceive, consume and engage with non-textual misinformation (such as audio deepfakes)? What is the role of prior beliefs and analytical ability in forming perceptions about the accuracy of misinformation? And, (ii) How can we educate users with lower levels of digital literacy to identify non-textual misinformation (e.g., audio messages impersonating public figures)? And, bring about behavioral changes such as reducing polarization?"

Interview with team at LUMS: https://lums.edu.pk/news/conversation-winners-facebook-research-award-2020

We use them to predict progression and regression of disease, how well your favourite smartphone did against the competition, the way plasma twists and turns on the boiling, roiling surface of the Sun and if you ever feel like figuring out the age of the Earth itself. Welcome to the world of differential equations! Oh and, if they get too hard – we can always use graphs and pretty plots to look at their solutions.

Say hello to the world of differential equations, recordings of a class, presented on YouTube by Dr. Amer Rasheed from the department of Mathematics. 

Dr. Amer Rasheed, who uses differential equations to make a living, took inspiration for his teaching in this covid-impacted semester, from classrooms filled with empty chairs and silence and decided to create content that could be delivered to a broader audience both inside and outside of LUMS. Dr. Amer was able to achieve this through smart class technology that can make education outreach easy, even from the confines of a physical classroom.

We believe that this course will help many physics, mathematics and engineering majors through its free distribution on a public platform. In SBASSE, LUMS, this is a required course for many physical science and all maths students. The course deals with first order
differential equations, system of first-order linear equations, introduction to special functions, Fourier series, partial differential equations and much more!

View them here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDEKrEe2g-sEmFMlMrVK_mgZW-st2lKJB

Pakistan is currently producing only about 40% of the gas it needs. The natural gas crisis in Pakistan behooves us to find innovative ways to improve consumption efficiency. In light of this, Dr. Hamad Alizai, Assistant Professor, and head of the Internet of Things (IoT) lab at LUMS, is working with a dedicated team of researchers to develop natural gas-saving devices and technologies. The IoT lab is part of the National Centre of Big Data and Cloud Computing (NCBC) which focuses on innovation and technology to bring about economic changes in Pakistan.

In winters, water- heating geysers start consuming about half of the gas supplied to homes. While a typical household uses warm water for approximately four hours a day, these geysers, which are equipped with manual thermostats, operate 24/7 and that too at their highest operating point, needlessly wasting gas for heating water that remains unused for larger periods. To address this problem, Dr. Hamad has joined forces with Dr. Nouman Ahmed Zaffar and Zaheen Machines to introduce the concept of a smart geyser called Ashray. Dr. Nouman Ahmed Zaffar, who is currently Associate Professor and Director of Energy and Power Systems at the Department of Electrical Engineering in LUMS, will work on the power electronics of Ashray.

Ashray is the extension of an existing product of Zaheen Machines known as Jul Bujh; a programmable geyser thermostat which allows users to control temperature settings of the geysers through a smartphone app. One of the main aims behind the design of Ashray is to minimize gas wastage which will help us save millions of rupees in foreign exchange that are otherwise spent on the import of liquid gas. Ashray will be equipped with smart sensors to detect the usage of hot water in a house so that the temperature of the water changes as per the requirement of the user. The smart sensors will limit the gas usage at times when the user does not require the water to be warm.

Ashray’s power and energy efficiency relies on smart power electronics. One of Ashray’s features is the automatic ignition of a geyser’s pilot. Apart from being a hassle, turning on the pilot comes with the risk of a user’s face being burnt in case of a gas leakage. The automation of pilot ignition provides users with both safety and ease.

Through these enhancements, Ashray aims to increase a geyser’s efficiency by 35%. With the huge success of its predecessor Jul Bujh, Ashray is all set to be commercialized for the winter season in 2021. Ashray will increase the comfort in our daily lives and on a lighter note make our winters much cozier. Samoon Iftikhar is Business Development Manager for the National Centre of Big Data and Cloud Computing.

Can we converse with a computer as naturally as we do with each other? If you’re interested in Natural Language Processing, check out this course by Dr. Asim Karim.

This course will cover the foundations of natural language processing (NLP) from textual content processing to corpus understanding. It is designed to develop the syntactic and semantic concepts of NLP and introduce the computational techniques for analyzing and understanding textual content. In addition to foundations, the course will also introduce significant application areas of NLP such as sentiment analysis, machine translation, and question-answering/conversational agents. A strong programming background is required for the course, and it is recommended for CS seniors and graduate students.

The course is taught by Dr. Asim Karim, Professor of Computer Science at SBASSE, LUMS. 

The course is available here:  https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAn6zoBVrrQZVOvbXxZGOjb4WPSmL8Jqz

A comprehensive introduction to the data mining process by Dr. Asim Karim.

Data mining is popularly applied in the industry and it is an active area of academic research.

This course will provide a comprehensive introduction to the data mining process; build theoretical and conceptual foundations of key data mining tasks such as itemset mining and clustering; discuss analysis and implementation of algorithms; and introduce major sub-areas such as outlier and time series analysis. Emphasis will be placed on the design and application of efficient and scalable algorithms. The students will get hands-on experience through the implementation of algorithms and use of software in the assignments.

This course is taught by Dr. Asim Karim, Professor of Computer Science, SBASSE.

Course link: https://bit.ly/3t5bkNh

A significant number of young people are impacted by geopolitical conflicts that displace them from their native environments and support structures. Such people face many hurdles in higher education and employment in the local market. Responding to the limited participation of such people in the socio-economic fabric of the country, LUMS is developing tailored services such as training programs and psychosocial services that would enable young migrants and refugees to gain employment in the ICT sector, which is a major economic driver in Pakistan. Project INTEGRA is funded by a 3-year capacity building grant from EU’s Erasmus+ Program. This joint project has partners from Greece, Portugal, and India. 

For details, please visit the project’s website: INTEGRA – DevelopINg Tailored comprEhensive services for younG migRAnts (project-integra.eu).   

Dr. Asim Karim, professor of Computer Science, is leading the effort from LUMS.

This workshop aim to bring together researchers from the UK & Pakistan to share research expertise and develop collaborations relevant to enabling a sustainable energy transition in Pakistan.

Eligible candidates should have obtained their PhD no earlier than 2010. Participants must also have a research or academic position (a permanent post, research contract, or fellowship etc.) at a recognised research institution either in the UK or Pakistan. 

Apply before 23rd April, 2021

Learn more: https://bit.ly/3uZyqWL

For his outstanding and vibrant contributions in the field of Computer Networks between 2011 and 2020, Dr. Zafar Ayyub Qazi has been recognized as the AI 2000 Most Influential Scholar (Honorable Mention). He ranks 17 in the list that includes researchers from Stanford, MIT, UC Berkeley, CMU, Google and Microsoft Research. 

Sifting through more than 133 million expert profiles and over 270 million publications from across the globe, Tsinghua University’s AMiner software generates a list that covers 20 sub-fields of computer science and recognizes top-cited research scholars who have made outstanding technical contributions with lasting impact. Moreover, inclusion of computer scientists in this list is recognized and celebrated by universities and technology companies due to its prestige. 

The list recognizes the top 100 computer scientists in a given sub-field based on the most citations in the top venues in that area from 2011-2020. For computer networks, they considered publications in the top research venues like ACM SIGCOMM and ACM MobiCom. We would like to extend our congratulations to Dr. Zafar Qazi on behalf of the entire SBASSE community and wish him well in all his future research.

Dr. Shafay Shamail has been made Professor and granted tenure in the Department of Computer Science at SBASSE. Dr. Shafay is a pioneer of software engineering in the country and has shaped this discipline. This celebratory news is a befitting acknowledgment of his all round contributions.

In the almost two decades of association with LUMS, Dr. Shafay has helped set up the Department and the School, as well as the Office of Research. His main research interests lie in the areas of software quality, e-commerce, service computing, autonomic systems, governance, and IT for development. By graduating the School's first PhD student, in a way, he initiated our graduate program as well. Dr. Shafay has taught a wide set of diverse courses including the popular CS 100 course, initiating large numbers of students into the art of programming and computational thinking.

Furthermore, Dr. Shafay has played an important role in the development of the software industry and its liaison with the academia. He serves on national accreditation and curriculum revision committees and is member of various Boards of Studies, and contributes to important policy level decisions at various forums. 

Dr. Shafay Shamail earned his BSc Electrical Engineering from UET Lahore, MSc Electronics from University of Wales, UK and PhD degree in Electrical Engineering from University of Bath, UK.

Three members of the SBASSE faculty have been awarded the inaugural Vice Chancellor’s Award for Teaching Excellence! These awards mark a new beginning in our institutional culture.

Dr. Tariq's inspirational teaching in the lab and classroom, his courses on developmental biology and genetics are the perfect mix of insight, crystal clarity and futurism. For example, see this video in which he describes the marvelous richness of the fruitfly's eye.

Dr. Zubair's immaculate presentations on signal processing are evidenced by the teaching material he has made public for everyone's consumption. One example is his Machine Learning course. For example, see the candeur with which he describes the mathematically complex problem of duality, delving into its geometrical interpretation. 

Finally, Dr. Momin has broken new grounds in defining the EE100 milieu, a course that brings research problems in engineering right to the doorsteps of our freshmen, truly breaking temporal boundaries. His teaching of Signals and Systems bespeaks a solid grip of the student and pedagogical clarity.

On behalf of all students and Faculty, we’d like to extend congratulations to Drs. Muhammad Tariq, Momin Uppal and Zubair Khalid for their well-deserved recognition.