Dr. Jibran Rashid will be talking about “Problems from Quantum Contextuality and Nonlocality” on 5 November 2021 at 3pm PKST.

Dr. Jibran is currently working as Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Institute of Business Administration, Karachi.

Join us via Zoom link: https://lums-edu-pk.zoom.us/j/97438320644

This seminar is being organized by the Department of Computer Science at SBASSE LUMS.

Dr. Abdul Rafae Khan will be talking about “Towards Robust NLP” in the next Computer Science (CS) Research Seminar on Friday, November 12, 2021 at 4pm PKST.

Join us via Zoom meeting link: https://lums-edu-pk.zoom.us/j/8353602730?pwd=emFaM21hNGtWNHhHZ0dmZm5ueFZqUT09

About the speaker:

Dr. Abdul Rafae Khan has been working as a Postdoctoral Fellow at Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey since 2020. He completed his Ph.D. from the City University of New York in Robust Neural Machine Translation. Dr. Khan holds a Master's degree from Lahore University of Management Sciences. His research interests are in Neural Network-based Natural Language Processing with a focus on improving the quality and robustness of noisy/informal text (commonly used in social media and text messages). His research has been published in leading Natural Language Processing venues including JNLE, EMNLP, and NAACL. He has participated in and won Natural Language Processing competitions including WMT 2018 Biomedical Machine Translation Task and SemEval 2019 Cross-lingual Semantic Parsing task. The SemEval organizers awarded Dr. Khan a student scholarship. Apart from his research duties, Dr. Khan has also supervised several undergraduate and graduate students in their Bachelor's and Master's theses respectively.

The Department of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering presents a seminar on Applying for Graduate Schools by Dr. Shahana Khurshid on 29 October 2021 at 12pm.

About the speaker:

Dr. Shahana Khurshid is an adjunct faculty in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at SBASSE, LUMS. She obtained her B.S. in Environmental Engineering from MIT, M.S. in Biomedical Engineering and Ph.D. in Environmental Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin. After her Ph.D. she has worked at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research is on air pollutants and their ability to cause adverse health effects. In addition to physical and chemical characterization of air pollutants, she studies biologically relevant metrics of particles such as the concentration of reactive oxygen species and the oxidative potential of particles, as well as biological characterization of lung cells exposed to pollutants. 

Seminar is being held in person and the meeting room will be projected over Zoom for those who cannot join in person.

On-campus students can join by visiting the venue: 9-B2 Auditorium

Join via Zoom meeting:

https://lums-edu-pk.zoom.us/j/97545774721?pwd=eGhxcFFpcGlrb3dqNlVBMVBKL3NNQT09

Meeting ID: 975 4577 4721

Passcode: 535495

Dr. Bilal Wajid will be talking about “From Diagnostics to Data Science – an Art of Problem Solving” on 29 October 2021 at 2:30pm. This research seminar is being organized by the Department of Computer Science at SBASSE, LUMS.

For joining us via Zoom, please go to this link: https://lums-edu-pk.zoom.us/j/98917640510?pwd=amlYRExmTUlHRzhtOFUvNlU1MEY0UT09

Venue for in-person attendees: CS Smart Lab, Left-Wing, Ground Floor, SBASSE LUMS

About the speaker:

Dr. Bilal Wajid is currently working as Head of Research and Development (R&D) at Sabz-Qalam, Lahore, Pakistan. He completed his PhD in Electrical Engineering from Texas A&M University (TAMU), College Station, TX, USA in 2015. He has previously taught at Texas A&M University, CS (TX, USA), Texas A&M International University, Laredo (TX, USA), DUKE University, Durham (North Carolina, USA), Istanbul Commerce University, Istanbul (Turkey), American University in Dubai (U.A.E.), University of Management & Technology and University of Engineering and Technology, Lahore, Pakistan. 

Dr. Faisal Aslam will be speaking about “Understanding Quantum Search Algorithm” on 15 October 2021 at 11am. This research seminar is being organized by the Department of Computer Science at SBASSE, LUMS. 

Dr. Faisal is currently working as Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science at the University of Punjab.

Venue for in-person attendees:  Saeed Saigol Auditorium, Academic Block

Online attendees can join via Zoom: https://lums-edu-pk.zoom.us/j/97111825193?pwd=dVNMRmkyL2lvcy92NnNscEtKam9Idz09

Meeting ID: 971 1182 5193

Passcode: 413456           

Centre for Water Informatics & Technology at LUMS is pleased to announce the next talk of the "Best of Water Systems Research" seminar series. The talk will be delivered by Dr. Ariel Dinar of UC Riverside and is titled "Dealing with Water Scarcity and Salinity: Adoption of Water Efficient Technologies and Management Practices by California Avocado Growers". 

About the speaker: Dr. Ariel Dinar is a Distinguished Professor of Environmental Economics and Policy at the School of Public Policy, University of California, Riverside (UCR). His work addresses various aspects of economic and strategic behavior associated with management of water, land and the environment. Dr. Dinar received his PhD from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Since then he spent 15 years in the World Bank working on water and climate change economics and policy. In 2008, Dr. Dinar assumed a professorship at UCR. Dr. Dinar founded the Water Science and Policy Center, which he directed until 2014. Dr. Dinar is an International Fellow of the Center for Agricultural Economic Research of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel since November 2010; a Fulbright Senior Specialist since 2003; and was named a 2015 Fellow of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association. He authored and co-authored nearly 250 publications in peer reviewed journals, policy outlets and book chapters. He co-authored and edited 29 books and textbooks. He founded two technical journals (Strategic Behavior and the Environment, and Water Economics and Policy) for the latter one he serves at present as an Editor-in-Chief. He founded and serves as the Editor-in-Chief of the book series Global Issues in Water Policy.    
 
About the seminar series: The “Best of Water Systems Research” is a webinar series initiated by The Center for Water Informatics & Technology at LUMS. While our companion webcast series “Aab Beeti” is geared towards generating public awareness and meeting leading practitioners and opinion makers in Pakistan’s water sector, this new series (BWSR) is primarily meant for discussing serious scholarship on water resources. The series celebrates distinguished works in water systems research and is aimed towards researchers, practitioners, and technical experts in water-related areas. The list of speakers majorly consists of individuals who regularly deploy quantitative data-driven methods & systems thinking and have earned recognition via peer-reviewed research in top journals. Also, many of the speakers may or may not have a direct interest in the Indus or South Asia’s other basins.

The talks are (mostly) delivered bi-weekly on Wednesday evenings. A tentative schedule for the webinars can be found at https://wit.lums.edu.pk/BWSR2021 which also includes recordings of past sessions and information on future speakers.

A link for attending will be sent via email to registered individuals. Colleagues who register once can attend all future talks without the need to register again.
 

The Centre for Water Informatics & Technology at SBASSE, LUMS is extremely excited to announce the launch of a webinar series intended to celebrate distinguished works in ‘Water Systems Research’. The seminars will be targeted towards researchers and technical experts working in water resource systems and will be delivered by scientists who have produced acclaimed research in the field. Securing the future of our water resources is becoming less of a problem of scarcity and more of a problem of effective management of what we already have. We strongly believe that this can be achieved only by adopting a systems perspective on water that takes into account the intricate linkages connecting the water system with food, energy, technology, and society. 'Best of Water Systems Research' is aimed at propagating the science and techniques of exactly this approach to sustain our water resources. In this series, WIT will be inviting top researchers who have applied systems theoretic methods to address real problems in water resource management.

The first talk will be delivered by Dr. Andrew Bell from Boston University on his work on participatory irrigation management in Punjab, Pakistan. Other confirmed speakers include Dr. Murugesu Sivapalan from UIUC, Dr. Ariel Dinar from UC Riverside, Dr. Grey Nearing from UC Davis, and Dr. Michael Mitchell from CSU Australia. Many other esteemed researchers are (and will be) invited and we are very excited to be able to learn collectively from their wealth of experiences. 

The talks will (mostly) be delivered bi-weekly on Wednesday evenings. A tentative schedule for the webinars can be found at here, while you can register here. The webinars will be streamed via zoom with the opportunity to interact with speakers during the Q&A after the presentation ends. A link for attending will be sent via email to registered individuals. Colleagues who register once can attend all future talks without the need to register again. 

The first talk will be delivered by Dr. Andrew Bell from Boston University and is titled: "Finding the next steps forward for IBIS water governance". The talk is scheduled for 6:00-7:00 pm PKT on Wednesday, July 28, 2021 and will be moderated by Dr. Talha Manzoor, Assistant Professor, Center for Water Informatics & Technology. 

About the speaker: Andrew Bell studies livelihoods and resource decision-making. including domains of irrigation, pest management, ecosystem services, technology adoption and migration. Most of his work applies survey and experimental tools (games, high-frequency smart-phone based surveys) to identify and model behaviour; and agent-based models to understand what these behaviours imply for system-level outcomes under scenarios of environmental change. He received his PhD (2010) in Natural Resource Management from the University of Michigan's School of Natural Resources and Environment (SNRE, now SEAS), also MASc in Environmental Engineering from Waseda University and BASc in Environmental Engineering from the University of Waterloo. 

For more details and queries, contact Soban Hameed Saigol from WIT at soban.hameed@lums.edu.pk.

The Computer Science department at SBASSE is holding a talk on “Predictive Auto-scaling of Multi-tier Applications Using Performance Varying Cloud Resources” by Dr. Waheed Iqbal on Friday, February 26 at 4:00 pm.

About the speaker: 

Waheed Iqbal received a PhD degree from the Asian Institute of Technology (AIT), Thailand, in 2012. He earned a dual master's degree from AIT and Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Spain. He is currently an Assistant Professor with the Punjab University College of Information Technology (PUCIT), University of the Punjab, Lahore, Pakistan. During 2017-2018, he worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher at Qatar University. His research interests lie in cloud computing, distributed systems, big data, and applied machine learning. Waheed published his work in top system venues, including IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing, IEEE Transactions on Service Computing, IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management, IEEE Systems, Future Generation Computing Systems, IPDPS, SOSP, CCGrid, and CloudCom.

Join us via the Zoom link: 

https://zoom.us/j/93245438557?pwd=MWdsYytKME5nRU9HYzRqeVRNNlNGQT09

Meeting ID: 932 4543 8557

Passcode: 049760

All aboard the quantum train!

QPakistan has partnered up with LUMS to invite SBASSE students for a workshop on the basics of quantum computing and programming. This workshop was free for both undergraduate and postgraduate SBASSE students.

The workshop began from 2^nd November, between 6:30pm and 9:30pm each day till 6^th November. It was conducted in English, used Discord along with Zoom for daily sessions and covered an introductory tutorial that included basics of classical systems, basics of quantum systems, basic quantum operators, quantum correlation, quantum protocols and quantum search algorithm. Participants were expected to know basics of Python to be able to complete the workshop and earn their diploma.