Taar Group consists of multiple companies across Lahore, Karachi and London specializing in areas of IT Strategy, Retail Systems and Textile Manufacturing Systems. As authorized business partners of Retail Pro International, USA and Industrial Automation Software, GmBH, Taar provides globally recognized industry specific software solutions to its customers worldwide.

The speaker Mr. Abdul Aziz, is CEO of LumenSoft Technologies Pvt. Ltd. LumenSoft is a product company provided Point-of-Sale products in the retail industry in the national as well as in the international markets. Mr. Aziz has more than 20 years of work experience in different management roles. He has abachelor’s in electrical engineering (Communications), Masters in Business Administration (Marketing), and MS degree in Computer Science. He will be presenting the software development processes his product company is utilising to develop a quality product for the national as well as international retail market.

A two-time Chair of the University of Texas Computer Science Department, Prof. Bruce Porter serves as the company’s Chief Science Officer, where he leads the company’s R&D initiatives. As a university professor, Prof. Porter's research focused on machine reading, a technology that holds tremendous potential for capturing knowledge for automated inference, question answering, explanation generation and other AI capabilities. Prof. Porter also directed UT’s Knowledge Systems Research Group, an AI organization with the goal to develop methods to build knowledgeable computers. He won the Best Paper Award at the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, the College of Natural Sciences Teaching Excellence Award, the National Science Foundation’s Presidential Young Investigator Award and the President’s Associates Teaching Excellence Award.

Katharina Krombholz is currently a visiting faculty at LUMS. She is tenured faculty at the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security in Saarbrücken (Germany) where she leads the Usable Security and Privacy Research Group (currently with 7 PhD students and 1 PostDoc). She obtained her PhD at the Technical University of Vienna in Austria.

Dr. Saad Nadeem is an Assistant Professor in the Departments of Medical Physics and Pathology at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC). He completed his PhD in Computer Science from Stony Brook University in 2017 and his postdoc from MSKCC in 2019 before transitioning to an Assistant Professor position. His lab develops advanced mathematical and machine learning techniques for analyzing patient data at multiple scales (macro: radiology/radiation oncology/surgery/endoscopy, meso: pathology, and micro: molecular - genomics / proteomics / transcriptomics / metabolomics) to improve patient outcomes. The lab is specifically focused on building user-friendly tools that seamlessly fit into the clinical workflows and facilitate accurate and timely diagnosis/prognosis/decision-making while aiding in novel biomarker discovery.

Dr. Maryam Abdul Ghafoor is an Assistant Professor at the National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences (FAST-NUCES). She completed her Ph.D. in Computer Sciences under the supervision of Dr. Junaid Haroon Siddique at the Lahore University of Management Sciences in the year 2020. She has previously taught at the Capital University of Science and Technology, IIMS, and the University of Punjab. Her research interests include program analysis, machine learning techniques, and digital health. She has published papers in ASE, ICST, FIT, CHI, and SQJ.

Dr. Naveed Anwar Bhatti is an Assistant Professor at Air University (Pakistan). He completed his Ph.D. from Politecnico di Milano (Italy) in 2018. Later, he joined RI.SE (Sweden) as an ERCIM postdoctoral fellow for one and a half years. His research interests focus on modern networked embedded systems with a touch of cyber security. Out of this research, he managed to publish papers in SenSys, IPSN, EWSN, ICC, IEEE IoT, TECS and TOSN which are considered flagship events in the field of networked embedded systems. He also won the best Ph.D. presentation award at IPSN 2016. He has also served as a reviewer for ACM Computing Survey, IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology (TVT) and IEEE Transactions on Very Large-Scale Integration Systems (TVLSI). He was also on the technical program committee (TPC) of ICPADS 2019, AlgoSensor 2019, ISIoT 2019 and IoTDI 2019. He has also received numerous grants worth Rs. 25 million in the areas of cyber security and the Internet of Things (IoT) from local and international funding agencies (Erasmus+).

Shahzeb is equipped with an engineering degree from FAST and an MBA degree from LUMS and is currently working at Grafana Labs as a Senior Cloud Integration Engineer. He has previously worked with big names in the technology space like Afiniti and Plumgrid.

Apart from his corporate career, he also has a very strong freelancing profile where he has built multiple technical solutions for his clients along with his team independently.

Workshop Agenda:

Please refer to the workshop datasheet here.

Prerequisites:

The prerequisites for this workshop include understanding fundamental programming concepts in Python 3, such as functions, loops, dictionaries, and arrays; familiarity with Pandas data structures; and understanding how to compute a regression line.

Suggested materials to satisfy prerequisites: Python Beginner’s Guide.

Questions?

Contact the instructor (Dr. Abdul Bais, abdul.bais@lums.edu.pk)

Register Here

Dr. Ali is an experienced researcher and engineer for manufacturing automation with a demonstrated history of working in higher education and manufacturing industry. His skills are in engineering system design, human-robot teaming, simulation modelling and industry 4.0 strategy development. Ali received his Ph.D. in Manufacturing Systems from the University of Southern Denmark, and has been working in Danfoss, LINAK, and Siemens Renewable Energy in Denmark. Recently, Ali has made a shift towards academia and is working as an assistant professor at Oakland University, in Michigan, United States. His work has been published in Science Robotics, Journal of Manufacturing Systems, World Economic Forum and other outlet. 

Khurram Afridi is an Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Cornell University. He received the BS degree in electrical engineering from Caltech (1989), and SM (1992) and PhD (1998) degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT. His research interests are in power electronics and energy systems incorporating power electronic controls. Prior to joining Cornell, he was an Assistant Professor and the Goh Faculty Fellow at the University of Colorado (CU) Boulder (2014-2018), a visiting faculty at MIT's EECS Department (2009-2014), and the Chief Operating Officer (2000-2010) and Chief Technology Officer (1997-2000) of Techlogix. From 2004 to 2008 he led the development of LUMS School of Science and Engineering (SSE) as Project Director. He has also worked for JPL, Lutron, Philips, and Schlumberger. He is an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Transportation Electrification and the IEEE Journal of Emerging and Selected Topics in Power Electronics and was the Technical Program Committee (TPC) chair for the IEEE Wireless Power Transfer Conference (WPTC) 2015. He received the Carnation Merit Award from Caltech (1988), the BMW Scientific Award from BMW AG (1999), the Werner-von-Siemens Chair for Power Electronics from LUMS SSE (2008), the Dean's Professional Progress Award from CU Boulder (2015), the ECEE Department Outstanding Overall Performance Award from CU Boulder (2016), and the National Science Foundation CAREER Award from NSF (2016). He is co-author of five IEEE prize papers.

Dr. Ali R. Butt is a Professor of Computer Science (and ECE by courtesy) and Associate Department Head for Faculty Development in CS@Virginia Tech. He is an ACM Distinguished Member. He received his Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Purdue University in 2006, and B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from UET Lahore in 2000. He is a recipient of a number of awards such as the NSF CAREER Award and IBM Faculty Awards. He has served as the Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing, ACM Transactions on Storage, and IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems,  He is an alumni of the National Academy of Engineering's US Frontiers of Engineering (FOE) Symposium and National Academy of Science's AA Symposium on Sensor Science. Ali's research interests are in: cloud and high-performance computing systems; systems support for machine and deep learning applications; file, I/O, and storage systems; distributed systems; and large-scale experimental computer systems. At Virginia Tech he leads the Distributed Systems & Storage Laboratory (DSSL).