Dr. Wasif Khan has been recognized as an exemplary faculty member to help establish departmental connections with the industry and leading initiatives for societal impact. Along with other colleagues, his untiring efforts have opened the door for EE students to gain opportunities for internships and other types of industrial exposure. Dr. Wasif works directly with several local and international industries for his research. Dr. Wasif collaborated with the National Incubation Center (NIC) to establish a Maker's Lab at LUMS with industrial funding. The Maker’s Lab has opened its doors to faculty, students, and industry professionals nationwide for prototyping products and learning industrial skills. His efforts have also helped create a technology development fund at LUMS for the electronics industry to support entrepreneurial activities by our faculty and students. He is also the patron of the IEEE student chapter at LUMS, which organizes electronics and computing-related activities for students. Dr. Khan is also a distinguished researcher in the area of RF and Microwave systems. Receiving a Distinguished Teaching Award or Outstanding Service Award is one of the highest recognitions for faculty at any academic department.

The Department of Electrical Engineering continues to celebrate the excelllent academic placements of it’s students in top international universities across the globe. We are thrilled to announce that Nazish Naeem, a BS student from The Department of Electrical Engineering at SBASSE, has been offered a fully funded PhD position at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), for Fall 2021 admissions. She will be joining Signal Kinetics Group at the MIT Media Lab, where she hopes to bring her contribution towards “inventing, building, and deploying wireless sensor technologies to address complex problems in society, industry, and ecology”.

Expressing her gratitude to the department, while accentuating its role in her achievements, Nazish recalled that being a first-generation college student, she had always believed in the power of education. Nazish mentioned that soon after starting her career as a student of Electrical Engineering at SBASSE, the opportunities provided by her teachers in the School broadened her horizon and paved the way for a better understanding of concepts along with experimental analysis. “The amazing opportunities at the EE department prepared me to set out on my research endeavor, no matter what stage I was at in my research career, the faculty always supported and guided me throughout the process”, she mentioned.

Nazish found herself fascinated by the field of Signal Processing and developed her research portfolio in this area. She plans to continue her higher studies in the same field. The entire SBASSE community wishes her best of luck in her future studies and research.

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

Winner of the inaugural Syed Babar Ali Research Awards, Dr. Abdul Rehman Aslam from the Department of Electrical Engineering at SBASSE has been selected for the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society Pre-Doctoral Award!

The purpose of the annual IEEE Circuits and Systems Society (CASS) Awards is to illuminate the accomplishments of its members and celebrate their dedication and contributions in the field. CASS offers grants to recognize its young members enrolled in a PhD program in a field related to the Society’s Field of Interest. The Society has membership top-tier scientists from across the globe and organizes numerous conferences every year. Winning an award from the CASS is a high honor that is only granted to the best researchers, from only the finest of research institutions.

In honor of this recognition, the CASS will grant an amount of USD 2,500 to Dr. Abdul Rehman Aslam to aid his ongoing research efforts. Dr. Rehman credits this achievement to the support and mentorship of his PhD advisor, Dr. Awais bin Altaf. Dr. Rehman’s work on developing wearable technology to sense early symptoms of ASD (Autism Spectral Disorder) by monitoring brain activity of affected children, had won him the SBARA award last year. We congratulate Dr. Abdul Rehman Aslam on this laudable achievement and wish him success in his future research.

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. 

Dr. Momin Uppal and his team have secured a grant of Rs. 210 million for a project that strives to infuse sustainability to our cities, using technological innovations and data driven policy making. The project comes as a response to HEC’s Grand Challenge Fund (GCF) call for proposal, which seeks to promote research excellence in strategic sectors of the economy by supporting large, multisectoral/multidimensional research projects. Dr. Momin’s project was one of five funded under the GCF, out of more than 700 applications from across Pakistan. 

Seen from above, the urban sprawl of Pakistan’s major cities looks like the work of an opportunistic contagion; it is chaotic, unplanned and stems a family of problems that we are all aware of and are frequently affected by its messy spin-offs. An ever-increasing strain on cities’ infrastructure, environment, and public services are just a few of the most pressing issues. While Pakistan has seen data collection initiatives in the past, they have so far failed to box in these problems because of a lack of investment in technological advancements. Dr. Momin Uppal is the Principal Investigator of a project where the goal is to enable the use of technological innovations in data gathering, data analytics, and data-driven decision making for addressing problems that have plagued small and large cities of Pakistan. 

To achieve this broad objective, the activities within the three-year project duration will focus on six separate, albeit intertwined vertical dimensions of an urban system. These so-called verticals span Pakistan’s pressing urban problems of sprawl, environment and health, and mobility. In particular, the six verticals are:

1. Mapping and analysis of sprawl in major cities of Pakistan
2. Smart solid waste management through remote monitoring solutions
3. Analysis of urban mobility patterns
4. Tracking and countering air pollution
5. Tracking spatial prevalence of disease as well as analyzing vaccine coverage, and 
6. Developing sustainable urban logistics solution

Each one of the six verticals will be guided by intricately linked horizontal themes that have been designed so as to enable transdisciplinary activities as well as to ensure maximum engagement with relevant stakeholders. The horizontals include Data collection, Data  analytics, Development of software toolsets, Capacity building, and Data-driven decision making and policy design. Not only will the project utilize publicly available data as well as data-sets obtained from partners, it will also focus on developing customized data-collection solutions such as a crowd-sourced network of vehicle-mounted sensors and smart device-driven data capture for urban mobility informatics, a ground-based air quality sensing network etc.

The project consists of a truly multidisciplinary team of national and international scientists. It has experts in engineering, information processing, machine learning, bio-informatics, and computer science (the technologists), as well as in urban economics, evidence-based policy design, urban policy, and public health. We wish all the best to Dr. Momin Uppal and his team in pursuing all the primary objectives of this mega project. 

You can read more about this project on saving our cities here. 

Listen to the story from Dr. Momin here: 

Specific training of Integrated Circuit (IC) Design focused on Layout of the operational amplifier in 180nm Bipolar CMOS & Deep-Trench (BCD) High Voltage Process was held at Electrical Engineering Department (EED), Syed Babar Ali School of Science and Engineering (SBASSE), LUMS. The training was planned for the scientists and engineers of the National Electronics Complex of Pakistan (NECOP). The training was conducted by Dr. Awais Bin Altaf, Assistant Professor, EED, SBASSE, LUMS and was attended by 10 (ten) NECOP participants. The five days, eight hours per day, training focused on the layout design, design rule check (DRC), layout vs schematic (LVS), post-layout simulation, and final sign-off process for the chip fabrication (taepout). The trainees performed all these tasks in the Embedded Lab in EED using industry-standard Cadence and Mentor Graphics CAD tools for the IC design. This training will help in bridging the gap between industry and academia, and will lead to future joint collaborative efforts in the area of IC design.

This training took place between June 21st and 25th, 2021. 

The NECOP participants also engaged during their visit with the EED external relation committee (ERC) and discussed mutual projects of interest. The training concluded with a closing ceremony chaired by Dr. Abubakr Muhammad (Head of Department, EED) and Dr. Sabieh Anwar (Dean, SBASSE). 

Syed Babar Ali Research Awards Fellow, Dr. Adeem Aslam, worked on the development of novel techniques for the processing of signals defined on the sphere. With applications in astronomy, cosmology, acoustics, medical imaging, geophysics, and wireless communication, spherical signals are commonly represented in terms of spherical harmonic functions. In his dissertation, Dr. Adeem worked on signal estimation on the sphere in the presence of random anisotropic noise. He also worked on the use of Slepian basis functions (a localized basis representation) to support localized signal analysis on the sphere. Additionally, he worked on the use of Slepian basis functions for multiscale (multiresolution) analysis of spherical signals through hierarchical partitioning of the sphere into pixels of varying spatial extent. 
 
In this high-quality work, a total of five international journal publications have been published or accepted by Dr. Adeem together and his adviser. All the papers have been published in either IEEE Transaction on Signal Processing or IEEE Signal Processing Letters.  In addition, three international conference publications have also been published. 

You can learn more about his research here.

Ali Hussain Khan, under supervision from Dr. Naveed Ul Hassan from the Department of Electrical Engineering, deems 6G infrastructure as the future of secure and ubiquitous communication – of course, not without blockchain. According to this study, the vision for 6G is driven by futuristic applications like Human Bond Communication (HBC), Multi-sensory eXtended Reality Applications (XR), Wearable Technology based Futuristic Applications (WTech), Large-scale connected autonomous systems (LS-CAS), and greater support for several vertical domains. These applications have very stringent requirements of data rate, latency, and reliability. The nature of data collected by several 6G applications will be increasingly sensitive and critical. The successful adoption of 6G applications by the users would therefore require strict data security guarantees. The stringent network performance requirements of these applications will require support of technologies like Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RIS), TeraHertz (THz) communication, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and small cell networks. To enable efficient combination of these technologies for the provisions of resources to achieve the performance requirements, collaboration and coordination in a transparent and trustless environment is needed. These technologies also require dense network deployments which will lead to more infrastructure and complicated network deployment. Network decentralization will be needed to simplify the network deployment. In light of this, 6G requirements can be divided into performance-related and security-related requirements.

Blockchain will provide the desired transparency and trustlessness in the decentralized network. It will also provide the strict security requirements of the future communication systems because of its in-built security features. Blockchain is a distributed ledger technology where cryptography and hash functions are used to form a chain of data blocks, created when an event occurs and verified in a decentralized way using consensus algorithms. Automation on blockchain is managed through smart contracts which are computer programs stored on the blockchain to define the contractual obligations and enable the automatic transfer of assets between peers when the required conditions are met. Blockchain, initially only used in cryptocurrencies is now being used in other application domains like smart grid, connected vehicles, and Internet of Things.

To achieve the targets related to performance requirements, 6G networks are expected to be extremely dense 3D integrated communication systems. The previously underutilized vertical dimension (height and depth) would also become increasingly congested with the deployments of high-altitude platforms (HAPs), low-altitude drones, unmanned aerial vehicles, mega-constellations of low earth orbit satellites, and communication ships & submarines. This would make infrastructure and asset management a challenging task. Additionally, the ownership models along with the use of spectrum, computing power and data storage would also become much more complex in order to fulfill the performance-related needs of 6G applications. AI assisted and AI trained models would become increasingly common in 6G to solve challenging resource optimization problems for throughput maximization, latency minimization, and energy efficiency maximization. AI models would also generate and communicate critical signals for several vertical domain applications. Management and security of hard-trained AI models would also become complex in 6G systems. One of the most prominent features of blockchain is the creation of a trustless network where multiple non-trusting parties can interact with each other without any intermediaries. Confidence in the blockchain security features enables decentralized entities in the network to make automated transactions on the network with the help of smart contracts. Consensus algorithms and protocols further allow multiple distributed nodes on blockchain to achieve the same global view of the transactions taking place on the entire network. Integration of blockchain in 6G would therefore provide elegant solutions for resource and AI model parameter management.

With respect to security-related requirements, integration of blockchain in 6G would not only help but also control these targets. Through appropriate selection of network, consensus, and automation management algorithms, blockchain can provide desired levels of data integrity, nonrepudiation, and auditability. Blockchain allows asymmetric Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) based cryptography and the inclusion of privacy preservation frameworks for greater data privacy & confidentiality. Blockchain accepts new blocks only after verification through a consensus mechanism among multiple peer-to-peer (P2P) nodes. Every block is linked to its parent block (previous block in the chain) by a cryptographic hash function. This allows auditability and makes it possible to verify data all the way back to the genesis block. Data integrity in any block can be easily verified simply by checking the hash-trees. Moreover, as the blockchain size increases, data tampering becomes even more difficult because of the linkage between all the chained blocks. Due to these properties, blockchain is different and superior in many ways to traditional security solutions, and a good candidate for security-related requirements in 6G applications.

Commenting on his work, Ali Hussain Khan says “We will demonstrate that combining blockchain and 4G or blockchain and 5G cannot achieve the same level of synergy that we can obtain with blockchain and 6G. Our scenario consists of vehicles, drones and RSUs to incorporate all three dimensions in the system. We consider a data-sharing scenario between vehicles. The data within is considered valid after achieving consensus among the mining nodes after which the data-sharing record is uploaded to the blockchain.”

Ali also mentioned that his team derived the time required for one complete cycle of data-sharing and consensus by deriving relevant expressions based on data sizes and data rates. MATLAB was the primary tool used for all the simulations in this work. They also derived the response of a reputation calculation algorithm based on a pre-defined behavior and calculated the time required for malicious miner detection based on that. His team had observed that for all practical purposes, 6G performed the best and orders of magnitude better than both 5G and 4G. These simulation results are very promising and suggest the use of more secure blockchain implementations in 6G are possible as both complement each other. 

An unlikely team – Muhammad Musa, Hamza Adnan, Ibrahim Arif, Ibrahim bin Yasir, Irtaza Tanveer, Jowii Willianto, Maida Aizaz, Malik Moaz, all headed by captain Suleman Mahmood - with big dreams, Team Robusta boasts determination and tenacity, and is poised to participate in the International Fixed-Wing Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Competition, organized by TUBITAK and the Turkish government, to be held in Turkey in September 2021. The team members hail from multiple countries throughout Asia - South Korea, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia - and specialise in various fields, encompassing everything from Chemistry to Computer Science.

“We were shortlisted from amongst a pool of countless participants from all over the world for the next stage, wherein we have to bring our conceptual design to life by building the whole UAV from scratch.”, said Mr. Suleman Mahmood.

During this past year, the team (consisting of students from LUMS as well as three members from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology) got its creative juices flowing, researching every aspect of UAVs and RC planes the best they could, given the limited time and pressing deadlines. One of the greatest hurdles they faced was conducting Zoom meetings, given the different timezones they were all in, as well as coordinating everything remotely. 

While reflecting on the significance of the competition, Suleman said “In this high-profile global event, with undergraduate and graduate teams from every part of the world, we are proud to be representing our beloved country of Pakistan, and even more so, our honorable university, which is helping us shape our future and providing us with more opportunities than we can count to ensure that - this competition included. We want to make LUMS proud and help it stand out even more internationally, as Luminites part of a competition that is this far-reaching.”

“Thanks to LUMS and their generous support, both financial and moral, we were able to meet the requirements, and are currently flying towards our goal of building the UAV of our dreams.”, commented the team leader, Mr. Suleman Mahmood.

The students belong from the following cohorts of SBASSE LUMS:

• Suleman Mahmood – CS Major
• Muhammad Musa – CS Major
• Malik Muhammad Moaz – CS Major
• Hamza Adnan – EE Major
• Ibrahim Suhail Arif – EE Major
• Irtaza Tanveer – Physics Major