Center for Language Engineering lab of KICS UET Lahore brings up its latest project titled ‘Urdu Text to Speech: Integrating Prosody of Emotions’. The project is quite interesting and grabs the attention. It carries numerous objectives such as:

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KICS UET’s High Performance Computing and Networking Lab (HPCNL) lab comes up with a surprising and lucrative project of Urdu Search Engine that is unique and attention-grabbing from all aspects. Having a search engine in your own language is no doubt a thing to rave about. It is funded by HEC and is there to build largest Urdu content repository for the citizens of Pakistan.

Since all the major search engines in the world like Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc., still do not offer their services to fulfill all types of user needs. For example, these search engines do not provide a search infrastructure that is generic to all the languages spoken in the world. There are several reasons for this but one main reason is that each language is not only morphologically different from the other but also the syntax varies greatly. Unfortunately, the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) is also less explored in the context of Urdu language. Urdu language is 5th most spoken language of the world. Majority of Urdu speakers live in Pakistan, India, Canada, and UK.

Urdu search engine will not only provide the users of Urdu with an opportunity to search the content in Urdu but also will give the opportunity to the researchers to investigate Urdu specific challenges.

KICS UET’s IRIL Lab carries various research projects and each of these projects is simply lucrative. The lab has funded projects from HEC and amongst the latest, ‘Security Audit Tools for IoT Devices’ is also funded by HEC National Center of Cyber Security (NCCS).

This project is all about security. The limitation in the existing security audit tools is the lack of their adaptation for IoT devices. IoT devices are more generic than traditional embedded devices. They may have a very small footprint, limited resources, and they can be heterogeneous in nature.

This project will develop an integrated open-source auditing tool to evaluate the security of hardware, firmware, software and communication of IoT devices. This commercial project is all set to bring industry and academia on one platform and will generate good revenue by cutting cost.

Human Centered Robotics is administered by Al-Khwarizmi Institute of Computer Science (KICS) and Mechatronics & Control Engineering (MCE) department of UET, Lahore. It is a government funded lab and has affiliation with National Center for Robotics and Automation (NCRA). The primary objective of the lab is to indigenously design and develop integrated robotic systems. These integrated robotic systems, based on smart sensing and actuation, will be able to seamlessly interact with humans, actively learn from them and eventually create an effective collaborative environment.

The purpose is to produce indigenously developed robotic systems so that they become easily affordable for local industry and society.

13^th IEEE International Conference on Open Source Systems & Technologies (ICOSST) 2019

for more info visit conference website 

With a funding source from P&D (Planning and Development) Commission Pakistan, Al-Khawarazmi Institute of Computer Science brings up a very unique project called ‘Social Media Surveillance: Criminal Behavior Modeling and Prediction from Social Media Contents’. KICS UET’s lab ‘Intelligent Criminology Research Lab (ICRL)’ is working on this project.

It will detect the criminals, hate speakers, bad doers and propaganda generators. Today where social media’s importance is supremely high and we cannot take the eyes off it, the racism, hate speech, propaganda and negativity too are found massively there. Detection of such things now seems to take a driving seat. Thus to overcome it, ICRL research team is working on the idea. 

To control the social evils and do the surveillance, below will be done:

• Natural language processing techniques will be used to automatically identify such content online.

• Link analysis will be used to identify the criminals and their network.

• Geo-location will be used to track the location of the person making negative posts on social media.

• Law enforcement data coupled with social media content can greatly aid in crime control and investigation.

Center for Language Engineering Lab of KICS UET Lahore has been awarded a project by HEC Pakistan. In collaboration with TC Pvt. Ltd, this venture will be done. The title of this venture is ‘Automatic Pakistani Postal Address Recognition and Parcel Routing’. The research team at CLE will develop a system with which the postal system will become fastest and simplest. Automatic work will take over the manual work. The robust system is going to be introduced.

The project’s objectives are to:

• Develop an android application to assist the user, to capture, enhance and validate the images containing addresses dispatched on the envelop
• Develop address text area detection system by resolving skew, horizontal and vertical perspective distortion in camera captured images
• Develop address recognition system using deep learning algorithms
• Develop address fields extraction system using NLP and deep learning algorithms
• Develop a framework for automatic address recognition and parcel routing against barcode number

The scope of this venture is simply awesome. It will reduce time and human effort to manually enter the recipient and sender address. The project will improve the growth of the postal and courier service. The capacity building in the area of pattern recognition and natural language processing will be enhanced. The development of data will be done to the aid researcher in order to do R&D in the field of pattern recognition and NLP. It will also improve the capacity building for the development of other related projects such as SUI GAS meter reading and electricity meter reading which will have great impact on the government and Pakistani community to do automation of these major billing systems.

A meeting regarding the expansion and upgradation of IT network of UET’s main campus was held in UET Lahore where this matter was discussed in detail. Prof. Dr. Waqar Mahmood (Director KICS UET) headed the meeting and discussed this vital issue with the technical team.

Since UET was established way back in 1961, it has 24 engineering degree programs and an equal number of postgraduates and PhD programs. Thus the IT department (computer cell) of the university enacts a key role in enabling the research and learning environment that serves more than 10,000 users only in UET’s main campus. The IT infrastructure of UET has been laid down in an incremental way augmenting the available resources with new demands in an adhoc fashion for last 13 years. Therefore the growth in network traffic and demand from users for more bandwidth are constant challenges. This situation is compounded by the proliferation of mobile devices among students and faculties. To address these issues, the university is looking forward to upgrade its Wired Network infrastructure.

After network upgradation, our network will reach at 10 G and future enhancement up to 40 G.

IEEE COMSOC Lahore Chapter was awarded with the distinction of Outstanding Technical Chapter Award 2018 out of 5 Technical Chapters. The event was held at the Annual General Meeting (AGM) of IEEE Lahore Section on 12^th January 2019 at FAST Institute in Lahore, where Mr. Kashif Bashir, Chair IEEE Comsoc Lahore Chapter & Manager KICS UET Lahore, received the award from Dr Shafay Shamail LUMS (Past Chair IEEE Lahore Section) and Shahzeb Rahtoor Vice Chair IEEE Lahore Section

All IEEE student branches and faculty members attended this event applauded by all and sundry out there.

IEEE COMSOC Lahore Chapter organized a number of technical events in 2018 like 3^rd Episode of IEEE COMSOC Summer School 2018, co-sponsored two conferences ICOSST 2018 and ICACS 2018 apart from student competitions, technical visit and workshops. It has so many other plans for future as well.

It was a big achievement that took place with the support of Director KICS UET Lahore Prof. Dr. Waqar Mahmood, who congratulated Mr. Kashif Bashir and his team for achieving this milestone and great distinction.

From KICS UET Lahore, other team members who were awarded included Shahid Zulfiqar who received recognition of volunteer for serving IEEE Power & Energy Society Lahore Chapter as General Secretary for the year 2018. Ms. Mehwish Nadeem from KICS received IEEE WIE Outstanding Professional Award. Both Shahid Zulfiqar and Rizwan Naqvi from KICS UET were also conferred with Special Recognition at the event. Kashif Bashir was also given Best IEEE COMSOC Lahore Chapter award.

KICS UET Lahore arranged a motivational and inspirational talk on the subject ‘Unleash The Giant Within’ on 10^th April 2019 in Seminar Hall. The speaker of the talk was Muhammad Ali, who is a teacher, trainer, educator and motivational speaker. He holds a BS Mechanical Engineering degree from Ghulam Ishaq Khan Institute of Engineering and Sciences (GIKI). He keeps on delivering lectures and workshops among youth. Muhammad Ali has trained staff and faculty of many renowned companies such as PEL, Akhuwat, Pixels Software House, GIKI and Ripah University, etc. He has delivered seminars in various popular universities of Pakistan including UET Lahore, LUMS, Punjab University, SIMS, Ripah University, AIMS Institute, KITE, Shifa Medical College, GIKI, Quadi E Azam University and to name a few.

From students to faculty and staff all attended this much inspirational and motivational talk. Director KICS UET Lahore Prof. Dr. Waqar Mahmood too attended this talk. He talked about understanding oneself, knowing our values and much more. Muhammad Ali also gave religious references as well in his talk.