Dr. Naveed ul Hassan will be delivering a talk about reconfigurable intelligent surfaces in the Research Seminar Series organized by the Department of Electrical Engineering on Sep 24 at 11:00 am which will be brought to you via zoom. The title of his talk is “Journey Towards 6G with Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces”.

About the Speaker:

Dr. Naveed Ul Hassan received the B.E. degree from the College of Aeronautical Engineering, Risalpur, Pakistan, in 2002, and the MS and PhD degrees from the Ecole Superieure d’Electricite, Gif-sur-Yvette, France, in 2006 and 2010, respectively. He is currently an Associate Professor with the Department of Electrical Engineering at SBASSE, LUMS. His research interests include wireless communication systems, smart energy systems, blockchain technology, and indoor positioning systems.  

Following is the zoom meeting link:

https://lums-edu-pk.zoom.us/j/91839741258?pwd=UkhxYzhtc1IyODd3cjUzVjJZTDFIQT09

Meeting ID: 918 3974 1258
Passcode: 021428

The next research talk will be on Friday, Oct 15.

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 Central Lab LUMS is offering an intensive 3-days course on Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM). It provides a unique opportunity of hands-on training on key aspects of SEM imaging from hardware introduction and detector adjustments to sample preparation and imaging using a variety of SEM detectors. The course includes lectures from experts in the academics and industry. The course will be conducted on an FESEM FEI Nova 450 NanoSEM system housed within the Syed Babar Ali School of Science and Engineering, LUMS.

The course is going to be offered between: September 1-3, 2021

Main Curriculum:

Hardware introduction, sample preparation (conducting, insulating, thin films), settings, adjustments and imaging with SEM detectors (including ETD, LTD, STEM and LVD detectors, CBS), EDX elemental analysis.

Course Participation Fee:

PKR 8,000 (for Students)

PKR 10,000 (for faculty)

PKR 15,000 (Industry)

*Fee doesn't include accommodation

Registration Closed 

Shortlisted candidates for the course will be contacted by 23rd of August.

Targeted Participants:

Individuals who perform or plan to use SEM imaging in research, academic, or industrial setting.

Invited Lectures:

Dr. Salman Noshear Arshad (Chemistry, LUMS), Mr. Daniel Phifer (Product Specialist at ThermoFischer), Lecture on Morphology and Physical Properties (Speaker to be announced)

For more information, please visit:

https://centrallab.lums.edu.pk/

http://sbasse.lums.edu.pk/

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.

Dr. Yarjan Abdul Samad is a world-renowned Pakistani scientist at Cambridge who is pushing the boundaries of nanotechnology in space science. Originally from a small village in a remote area of Pakistan, he has set great examples for hard work and resilience to become a space scientist at Cambridge.

We are honoured to have him for a discussion seminar where he will talk about "Graphene-based Hybrids and Composites and their Applications". 

Dr. Abdul Samad Is a Senior Research Scientist and a Teaching Fellow at Cambridge Graphene Centre. He Is the first Space Scientist from Pakistan at the University of Cambridge. His research work is focused on space technologies. and he has won several awards for his work. He is mentoring numerous graduate students. He got his Bachelors degree from Ghulam Ishaq Khan Institute (GIKI) in Pakistan and Ph.D. from Khalif., University with research work done at top Institutions of Japan, USA and China. 

The topics he will cover are:

• Production of Graphene and related materials for Spacecrafts
• Development of graphene based composites, aerogels and coated electronic textiles
• Applications of manufactured graphene based components 

This event is scheduled for the following, please tune in according to your time zones:
Sunday, 2 May 2021 @ 12 noon US (CST), 6 pm UK, 8 pm Turkey/KSA, 10 pm Pakistan

To watch the seminar LIVE, please visit the links below: 
Zoom: https://tinyurl.com/SM-Nano
FB Live:  fb.me/STEMatters & fb.me/YPSoc

Wajeeha Nafees defends her doctoral work on acquiring signals from spherical sources and novel techniques of representing them.

Working under the supervision of Dr. Zubair Khalid in SBASSE electrical engineering, Wajeeha has discovered amazing mathematical structures for applications in medical imaging, cosmology, computer vision and many others. We now know many new ways of listening and reconstructing signals emerging from spherical sources, thanks to this amazing body of work. Ideas from the work have been published in IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing (https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9052486), ICASSP 2018 and ICASSP 2019, flagship conferences on signal processing.

Final Defense Committee:

• Dr. Ali Arshad Nasir (EE, KFUPM) External Examiner
• Dr. Ali Ahmed (EE, ITU) External Examiner
• Dr. Ijaz Naqvi (EE, LUMS)
• Dr. Muhammad Tahir (EE, LUMS)
• Dr. Haniya Azam (Math, LUMS)
• Dr. Zubair Khalid (Supervisor)

The final copy of the thesis can be downloaded from the following link: https://www.dropbox.com/s/qf27drk10x984sy/thesis-final-Wajeeha-Nafees.pdf?dl=0

Muhammad Farooq from MS Electrical Engineering will be presenting his thesis defense on the topic of Climate Informatics for the Water Energy Food Nexus: A System Dynamics Perspective on Dairy Farm Operations on Tuesday, January 26th, 2021 at 2:30pm. This is the second stage of his thesis.

His thesis will be evaluated by the following Evaluation Committee:

• Supervisor:                  Dr. Abubakr Muhammad 
• Co-supervisor:            Dr. Talha Manzoor 
• Evaluator:                    Dr. Naveed Ul Hassan 
• Evaluator:                    Dr. Nauman Zafar Butt 

Giacomo Cavalli studied Biology at the University of Parma. In 1991, he moved to Zürich at the University of Science and Technology (ETH) to do his PhD, where he worked on chromatin structure and function in yeast with Fritz Thoma and Theo Koller. In 1995, he started a postdoc in the laboratory of Prof. Renato Paro at the University of Heidelberg. In 1999, he moved to IGH in Montpellier, France, to set up a junior lab and stayed at IGH ever since. Giacomo Cavalli made seminal contributions in the field of epigenetics. Using the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, he discovered that epigenetic inheritance of new phenotypes can occur independently on changes of the DNA sequence. His lab also discovered that the three-dimensional organization of chromosomes in the cell nucleus is a heritable trait that plays an important gene regulatory role.

The Cavalli lab identified 3D structural chromosomal domains dubbed Topologically Associating Domains or TADs. Finally, the Cavalli lab has shown that PcG proteins have tumor suppression activity in flies. Giacomo Cavalli has published more than 110 papers, cited over 13,000 times and many of which in top journals. He received numerous awards and distinctions, including an EMBO membership, the CNRS silver medal, the Allianz Foundation price, the Grand Prix 2020 of the Foundation pour la Recherché Médicale and two advanced ERC grants. He was director of the IGH Genome Dynamics department from 2007 to 2010 and IGH director from 2011 to 2014. He organized major international conferences and is appointed as members of several distinguished Institute- and Journal editorial boards.

Helge Grosshans is a senior research group leader at the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research (FMI; a non-profit research organization affiliated with the Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research) in Basel, Switzerland, and a Professor at the University of Basel. Following his studies of Biotechnology at the Technical University of Braunschweig, Germany, he did his PhD with Prof. Ed Hurt at the University of Heidelberg, Germany, working on RNA biogenesis and nuclear export in brewer’s yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Subsequently, he joined Prof. Frank Slack’s lab at Yale University as an HFSP postdoctoral fellow, to study the developmental and molecular function of microRNAs (miRNAs) in C. elegans. His work led to the discovery of the let-7 miRNA as a tumor suppressor gene regulating RAS.

In 2005, he started his own group at the FMI. Supported by highly competitive ERC Starting and ERC Advanced Grants, Grosshans’ work has focused on miRNA function and mechanisms of developmental timing. Among other breakthroughs, his group was the first to demonstrate that animal microRNAs are themselves regulated through RNase-mediated degradation and discovered that, in a reversal of normal function, mRNAs can modulate the levels of the miRNAs that target them. They also showed that miRNAs can exert biological function through regulation of one single target and that miRNA target repertoires are dependent on physiological context rather than being merely hard-wired by sequence. Following their discovery of massive oscillatory gene expression, affecting ~20% of the transcriptome in C. elegans larvae, Grosshans now focuses on characterizing the underlying machinery by combining theoretical and quantitative experimental approaches.

Electrical Engineering Seminar – “Multi-timescale optimization with energy storage in smart distribution grids” by Dr. Raheel Zafar, PhD University of New South Wales, Australia

Friday, December 18th, 2020, 3:00 pm - 4:30 pm

About the speaker: Dr. Raheel Zafar received his PhD in Electrical Engineering with specialization in Power Systems in 2019 from the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. His research focuses mainly on the technical challenges involved in the integration of renewable energy sources into distribution grids. His research has resulted in several publications in reputable journals and conferences including IEEE Transactions, Elsevier, and IEEE PES conferences. He completed his BSc Electrical Engineering in 2009 and MSc Electrical Engineering in 2011 from UET Lahore. He has worked in academia and industry for more than six years. He has worked as a Lecturer at UET Lahore. He has also served as an Assistant Professor at GIK Institute and UMT Lahore. His current research interests include convex relaxations, robust optimization, distribution system operation and control, multi-objective optimization, and smart distribution grids.

The speaker is a faculty candidate in electrical engineering department.

About the speaker: Usama Mehmood is a computer scientist investigating the verification of cyber-physical systems. He strives to develop practical formal methods that are both scalable and useful, which demands developing new theories, programming efficient tools, and building experimental systems. Some of the application areas he has worked on include multi-agent robotic systems and smart grids. 

Usama Mehmood received a Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering from LUMS in 2014, and a Master's degree in Computer Science from Stony Brook University in 2019. Currently, he is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Computer Science at Stony Brook University under the supervision of prof. Scott A. Smolka. He is the recipient of the Stony Brook CS Department Chair Fellowship award. He has worked at MathWorks during the summer of 2018 and Facebook during the summer of 2019.

This seminar by Dr. Usama Mehmood took place via Zoom on Monday, December 21 at 11:00 am.

About the speaker: Dr Tauseef ur Rehman is a graduate of College of Aeronautical Engineering Risalpur in Avionics Engineering. He did his PhD and Masters in Electrical and Computer Engineering with specialization in High Performance Computer Vision and Controls Systems, respectively, both from Georgia Institute of Technology, USA in 2010. Dr Tauseef carries over 30 years of R&D experience which includes faculty assignments at NUST and Air University as well as key appointments in several R&D setups within Defense Sector of Pakistan. Presently, he is serving as Chief Technology Officer of National Aerospace Science and Technology.

This seminar took place online via Zoom on December 18th 2020, at 5pm PST