Dr. Zubair Khalid, Assistant Professor in the SBASSE Department of Electrical Engineering, has been recently elected to the editorial board of IEEE Signal Processing Letters as an Associate Editor!

The IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) is a world renowned organisation for advancement of research in technology. It has more than 400,000 members, spanning over 160 countries. Dr. Zubair is no stranger to IEEE himself. Many of his research papers have been accepted to IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing and IEEE Signal Processing Letters, for publication.

We are very happy to share this wonderful news that showcases how the apogee of our faculty’s ambitions is not just limited to the campus. It is this ambition that creates a tether-less outreach of our faculty within the international community of researcher and scientists. Congratulations, Dr. Zubair Khalid!

This is time to share some wonderful news about our SSE Faculty who have demonstrated brilliance in all aspects of scholarship and whose contributions to knowledge creation and dissemination, teaching and institutional and societal service have been recognized by the University.

Dr. Irshad Hussain is a world recognized expert in nanomaterials and nanoparticle synthesis and harnesses them in diverse applications in the biomedical, energy and environmental fields. He is one of the country's most highly cited scientists and plays a significant role in advancing the fields of chemical and nanotechnology research in Pakistan. With recipient of several national and international awards, and a distinctive record of extra-mural funding, Dr. Irshad was among the founders of chemistry at LUMS which is now blossoming into one of the region's stronger programmes.

Dr. Hassan Abbas Khan in electrical engineering works in developing indigenous and globally relevant solutions for off-grid and rural electrification, solar energy devices, energy optimization and batteries technologies. He is a co-Founder of the LUMS Energy Institute, winner of several significant research grants and author of highly cited works in the world's best journals.

An outstanding aspect of Dr. Fareed Zaffar's research productivity is his involvement of undergraduates in research.  Another important dimensions is his engagement with Pakistan’s courts in organizing the judicial system as well as with other civil society and public sector organizations on healthcare, education and accountability. On this count, he leads the Technology for Peoples Initiative at LUMS and a strong research ecosystem in the areas of computer networks and internet security.

Giving back to the community is a beautiful thing. Since 2016, three faculty members from the Electrical Engineering Department at SBASSE, namely Dr. Momin Uppal, Dr. Muhammad Tahir and Dr. Zubair Khalid have been keeping busy during the summer break by hosting the Summer Research Training Program (SRTP). How successful has this project been for the participants? Read on.

The SRTP is a free-for-all program, open for students both inside and outside of LUMS. During the 6-week long routine, a series of lectures and hands-on trainings are conducted by the faculty, covering topics such as signal processing basics, wireless communication, machine learning, optimization theory, research paper reading, including MATLAB and Python training sessions. The SRTP has been an on-going effort for the past 4 years, with only 2020 being inactive due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

The first batch started off with just seven participants, but the numbers have since seen a steady growth with 2019 seeing eighteen participants! What is truly extraordinary is that some of the most noteworthy placements from the Electrical Engineering Department can be linked to such training programs, which are not even part of the regular curriculum of the school. Some of the notable alumni placements are:

We hope this beautiful mission continues to grow and inspire!

The Department of Electrical Engineering has started conducting experiments related to its brand-new course, EE553 – a high voltage engineering course, with the help of the newly established HV lab. In line with the COVID-19 SOPs, students were divided into two separate batches and visited the lab in two sessions. The laboratory is the result of untiring efforts by a team led by Dr. Muhammad Iqbal Qureshi who is working as an adjunct faculty at the Department of Electrical Engineering, and a Fellow at Institute of Engineers, Pakistan. Dr. Qureshi has made significant contributions to the field of high voltage engineering in a career spanning three decades.

We hope that the HV Lab becomes an important spawning ground for the work in the field of power systems and high voltage.

Neuroscience is an interdisciplinary research area which involves studying the nervous systems of different organisms. It is further divided into various subdisciplines depending on the scale of investigation, such as systems neuroscience, cognitive and behavioural neuroscience, molecular neuroscience, and theoretical/computational neuroscience. The field of neuroscience attracts interest from a wide variety of scientific domains. Mathematicians, physicists, engineers, computer scientists and the like are all actively participating in trying to uncover the mechanisms and functions of the brain.

I am an electrical engineer-turned neuroscientist. With a Bachelor’s and a Master’s degree in electrical engineering, I was still unsure about the research area I wanted to pursue. I was really inspired by the field of computational neuroscience which builds computational models that can help us understand and derive simpler explanations of how brains achieve complex functionality. To get a little flavor, I started working on building some computational models (recurrent neural networks to be precise) to understand how brains achieve volitional motor control abstractly.

The different types of movements that we are able to generate as humans are ultimately encoded as spatiotemporal patterns of neural activity within different brain regions. It is important to understand how such spatiotemporally varying patterns of neural activity could drive muscles and in turn generate desired movements and behaviours. In our experiments, we were able to embed such spatiotemporal activity patterns in the recurrent networks, which were stimulus specific, robust, and could be recalled efficiently. We argued that the abstract model provided many of the desired characteristics for flexible generation and recall of complex movements. Thus, we were able to derive a simple explanation of how voluntary motor control could be achieved with a system having certain desired properties. As one can imagine, research of this kind in computational neuroscience could have crucial ramifications for artificial intelligence (AI) as well.

This was my first foray into neuroscience. I often had this uneasy feeling that I was only doing work in silico and was not able to conduct experiments and study biological brains directly. To this end, I was fortunate to work as a research engineer at the Stanford Medicine in a Movement Disorders Center for a couple of years. It was exciting to be able to study movements in human patients and potentially test my computational models on real movement data. This was also my first experience in clinical / motor neuroscience which studies a variety of brain functions and their disorders, including the Parkinson’s disease.

The Parkinson’s disease is a debilitating neurological disorder with a prevalence of around 0.5-1% in Pakistan. It is a movement disorder where patients are unable to generate desired movements and suffer from tremor, bradykinesia (slowness of movement), and freezing of gait among other symptoms. Our centre used a surgical procedure called Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) to improve quality of lives of these patients. In DBS, electrodes implanted within certain brain regions of the patients provide electrical stimulation to those regions and it often leads to a drastic reduction in symptoms such as tremor and bradykinesia.

There are different theories about the mechanisms through which DBS works but a lot is still unknown, and this is an active and a relatively new research area. The electrodes which are implanted and internalized for stimulation sometimes also have the ability to record brain waves (local field potentials) from those brain regions.

This is how we get an interdisciplinary field of research where engineers and computer scientists try to make sense of these brain waves and derive some of the mechanism underlying disease pathophysiology.

I worked on some projects where I used signal processing and machine learning (ML) techniques to find neural biomarkers related to different symptoms of the disease.

I also had the opportunity of working on a project that involved closed-loop control of symptoms in these patients. Simply: find a neural biomarker related to a symptom (say elevated power in beta rhythm), define a control algorithm to maintain the biomarker in some desired state, record neural activity from the brain region, let the control algorithm determine if the biomarker (brain waves) is aberrant, and perform stimulation algorithmically to maintain the biomarker in a particular state and ultimately improve the symptoms—all in real-time. Such closed-loop control has proved to be more efficient than the open-loop versions with respect to side effects and other aspects. It is fascinating to see that we can manipulate brain circuits in real-time to achieve some desired functionality and improve symptoms in human patients, much like an electrical engineer manipulates electrical circuitry to achieve the desired performance in a system.

We recorded and stimulated in the subthalamic nuclei of these patients, an important detail from a neuroscience perspective, which are roughly part of the basal ganglia network, which in turn is involved in motor control.

In short, we listened to the brains of the patients to do the perturbations that would make them better. I am also involved in a project that uses DBS to control symptoms in treatment-resistant depression. It is very insightful to view these mental disorders as abnormalities in circuits or networks in the brain, as it allows us to perform precise perturbations that could help fix them.

For a country where neurological disorders like the Parkinson’s are on the rise, it is disappointing to note the lack of neuroscience research in Pakistan. It is definitely time that we set up such interdisciplinary research and education centres in Pakistan where people can work on different subdomains and add to the growing knowledge in these areas. This new appreciation of the potential of neuroscience might also help reduce the stigma associated with certain mental disorders in our society, such as depression.

When the Bond movie Die Another Day came up with the concept of a satellite that could be positioned anywhere around the globe and could harness solar light and target it on fields and crops that needed it, it may have seemed a little far-fetched. And while the satellite model is not exactly what has so far been replicated, there have been some wonderful advancements in the field of photovoltaics and how it can be used to improve agricultural produce. SBASSE’s own Dr. Nauman Zaffar Butt has been at the forefront of this work.

The field of photovoltaics has now crossed over into the realm of agriculture to produce the budding field of agrivoltaics. Powering agricultural farms through solar energy requires creative designs in both the solar cells as well as how solar cells will be integrated into a solar system that can power agri-farms.

Dr. Butt’s PhD student Hassan Imran has now produced an amazing body of work that helps achieve both of these tasks. Novel materials, novel designs of the heterofacial structure of solar cells, and the employment of two-dimensional layers of graphene or carbon nanotubes can boost the performance of solar cells, achieving almost thermodynamically maximum efficiencies. Creative ways to interface silicon-based and organic-inorganic solar cell technologies helps achieve the best of both worlds.

Finally, Hassan has mathematically modeled the role of soil and orientation of solar panels in achieving high efficiency crop yield from solar enhanced farmlands. This work has immense implications for the country which calls for innovative solutions to address critical problems at the food-energy-water confluence. The quality of his work is evidenced by the articles he has published “along with several conference proceedings” in the world’s leading journals on this topic: the IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices; the IEEE Journal of Photovoltaics; Solar Energy; and Renewable Energy. The Water-Food-Energy nexus remains one of the six forefront areas being pursued at the SBASSE.

Asad Ullah, Hassan Imran, Zaki Maqsood, Nauman Zafar Butt, Investigation of optimal tilt angles and effects of soiling on PV energy production in Pakistan, Renewable Energy, Volume 139, 2019, Pages 830-843, ISSN 0960-1481, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.renene.2019.02.114.

Dr. Awais Bin Altaf, and his PhD student Abdul Rehman Aslam, at the SBASSE Department of Electrical Engineering, have recently published their research in IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Circuits and Systems, one of the leading journals in the field.

The team came up with an idea of developing efficient hardware for the classification of Chronic Neurological Disorders (CND’s) in a non-invasive fashion. The method involves long term continuous monitoring with neurofeedback of human emotions for patients with CND’s to mitigate its harmful effect. This work presents hardware-efficient and dedicated human emotion classification processor for CND’s.

The scalp Electroencephalogram (EEG), also known in common parlance as a “brain wave,” is used for the emotion’s classification using the valence and arousal scales. A machine learning classifier is used along with carefully selected temporal and spectral features suitable for a wearable non-invasive classification system.

This work is among one of the first digital integrated circuit (IC) processor designed and implemented in

Pakistan with indigenous grant and the results are based on actual silicon measurement after fabrication. The team first presented the initial idea of the system at the IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems organised in Japan in 2019 on a field programming gate array (FPGA).

The research team is now working on the second generation of the system and plans to integrate the processor with an analog front end making the overall system miniaturized to fit onto a patch sensor for long term continuous monitoring, recording, and neuro feedback onto a single chip and performing a real-time measurement on CND patients.

A. R. Aslam, T. Iqbal, M. Aftab, W. Saadeh and M. A. Bin Altaf, “A10.13uJ/classification 2-channel Deep Neural Network-based SoC for Emotion Detection of Autistic Children,” 2020 IEEE Custom Integrated Circuits Conference (CICC), Boston, MA, USA, 2020, pp. 1-4, doi: 10.1109/CICC48029.2020.9075952.

A course on the interplay of electric and magnetic fields that empower our lives by Dr. Imran Cheema.

Dr. Imran Cheema takes his students on an electromagnetic tour, to marvel at the blend of the electrical with the magnetic world, through his online course aimed specifically for Physics and Electrical Engineering junior year students and can benefit anyone with an appetite to understand the nature of electromagnetic fields and waves.

The course discusses power lines, transmission losses, interpretation sinusoidal waves, uniform plane waves and parallel plate waveguides to name a few topics.  

This beautiful online course can be found here: https://bit.ly/3egqXNU

A thorough introduction to the theoretical foundations and practical applications of Machine Learning (ML) by Dr. Zubair Khalid.

This course is offered by Dr. Zubair Khalid, Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering, SBASSE.

Dr. Adeel Pasha has played a pivotal role in modernizing course contents in the area of embedded systems. In addition to preparing and delivering high-quality lecture content, Dr. Pasha's passion for teaching is most demonstrated by his untiring efforts towards enriching his students' learning experience with hands-on lab exercises and excellent mentorship. He is often seen sweating over lab equipment and ironing out all steps for the lab content. Faced with a fast-changing field, Dr. Pasha is known to continuously adapt his course content to ensure his students' cutting-edge training. His outstanding commitment is duly recognized by his students as well as his peers. Dr. Pasha is also an exceptional researcher, working in digital system design, embedded computing, and hardware architectures for artificial intelligence. Besides outstanding teaching and research, he has rendered invaluable services for the department. Receiving a Distinguished Teaching Award or Outstanding Service Award is one of the highest recognitions for faculty at any academic department.