Talks

Prof. Dr. Josef Börcsök

University of Kassel, Germany

Talk: Future Oriented Cyber Physical Safety Systems on Chip

Safety systems are demanded more and more frequently due to normative and technical requirements. Here, however, the requirements, especially in the area of “Cyber Physical Systems” with regard to reliability, safety, installation space and power consumption, are often a problem that cannot be solved with standard technologies. Much effort has been made in this area over the past decade to address this problem. So-called SSoCs (Safety Systems on Chip) represent a possible solution that is increasingly emerging. The lecture gives a brief overview of the solutions developed at the Institute for Computer Architecture and System Programming in this research field.

Prof. Dr. Dirk Draheim

Taltech, Estonia

Talk: Blockchains: Money for Nothing or Something for Everything?

Soon after the introduction of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin in 2009, and the quick rise of several further cryptocurrencies that followed the Bitcoin paradigm, its enabling blockchain technology has been perceived by the media (with a peak in 2017) as well as the public as having an immense disruptive potential, i.e., a potential to democratize financial markets, fundamentally transform entire industries, even whole societies, etc. Still, there is no convention of policymakers (and business tycoons likewise) all around the globe not having blockchains and/or cryptoeconomomics as a topic on its agenda. Silently, in the slipstream of the roaring disruptive narrative, blockchain-based technology has altered (and matured?) from permissionless to permissioned platforms that start to be productive in successful ICT sweet spot architectures. In this talk, we want to look at blockchain technology from a neutral, analytical perspective. We discuss technological and socio-economic barriers to blockchain solutions that are intrinsic in the blockchain technology stack itself. We look into permissionless as well as permissioned blockchains. We start with characterizing cryptocurrency as one-tiered uncollateralized M1 money. We proceed with defining essential modes of business communications and discuss how they are digitized classically. We review potential blockchain solutions for these modes of communications, including socio-economic considerations. Moreover, we also look into four successful blockchain solutions and explain their design. We address questions such as: What is the blockchain revolution and how realistic is it? Will it shake up our institutions? Or, vice versa: does it have to rely on a re-design of our institutions instead? Can we design useful blockchain solutions independent of fundamental institutional re-design?

A. Buldas, D. Draheim, T. Nagumo, A. Vedeshin (2021): A Deep Analysis of Blockchain Technology from Socio-Economic and Technological Perspectives: Intrinsic Barriers and Potential Impact. TechRxiv. Preprint.
Available at: https://doi.org/10.36227/techrxiv.16803151.v1

Dr. Faisal F. Khan

Principal Investigator at the NCBC Precision Medicine Lab, Peshawar and Assistant Professor of Bioengineering at University of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Swat

Talk: A case for Precision Medicine in Peshawar: Where data, signals and patterns meet in biology and medicine

H.E. Mrs. Androulla Kaminara

Ambassador of the European Union to Pakistan

Talk: EU – Pakistan cooperation and the opportunities available for Pakistan from digitalisation

Prof. Dr. Navrati Saxena

San Jose State University, California, USA

Talk: Towards a greener tomorrow: Steps beyond 5G wireless networks

Dr. Sufian Hameed

NUCES, Karachi

Talk: Adaptive Security for Collaborative Services in Smart Cities

In the future, we envision a world in which practically everything around us is connected to others, allowing for improved living standards through intelligent services. Self-driving drones will transport your groceries and sensors in your clothes, tracking your fitness. This future will only be conceivable because of the Internet of Things (IoT), Internet of Everything (IoT), 5G,6G communication technologies. Smart cities are made up of these communication technologies. Intelligent transport, smart homes, innovative hospitals are a few of the names that work as a system in the Smart City. These systems required a significant collaborative management effort to ensure the continuous performance of all associated operations (monitoring, reporting, and interventions) of the municipal system in a smart city. The long-term goal of a smart city municipal system is to increase the quality of collaborative services offered to people and eventually improve their quality of life. However, issues such as service provider trust, the dependability of sensed data, and data ownership are a few significant security and privacy barriers for collaborative services in smart cities in a municipal system. Therefore, in the future, we required a security framework for a smart city municipal system that works adaptively. All the actions during collaborative service between heterogeneous IoT networks must be recorded and tracked conveniently for audit authority.

Dr. Muhammad Abdelawwad

University of Kassel, Germany

Talk: Applications of functional safety in industrial human-robot collaboration

With the increasing complexity and compactness of electronic and electrical equipment, systematic and random failures have increased, leading to disasters in various industrial and everyday applications. To prevent or reduce these failures, various organizations at the national and international levels, such as the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), have developed a series of standards covering the safety aspects of electronic and electrical equipment in various applications. One of these sectors is robotics, where safety is a key issue as heavy robots interact with human workers in industrial environments. An example of the implementation of functional safety concepts in human-robot collaboration is presented. This includes the design and FPGA implementation of a Safety System on a Chip (SSoC) based on safety redundancy architectures.

Dr. Uzair Aslam Bhatti

Nanjing Normal University, China

Talk: Feature based image processing and security

Remote sensing image watermarking algorithm has weak resistance to geometric attacks; therefore, paper proposes a reversible watermarking algorithm based on SURF (Speeded Up Robust Features) feature points to select ROI and embed mid and low-frequency sub bands respectively, which can effectively resist geometric attack. The algorithm first extracts the SURF feature points of the carrier, and then performs a inverse wavelet transform on the carrier image to filter out the low-frequency coefficients of the ROI and the intermediate frequency coefficients of the non-interest area (ROB); With sampling pyramid decomposition, the near sub band after watermark decomposition is embedded in the low-frequency sub band of the region of interest, and the residual sub band is embedded in the intermediate frequency coefficient of the non-interesting region. Experimental data show that the algorithm can resist conventional geometric attacks. The similarity of the watermark is high, and the NC value is kept above 0.89, which has good reversibility and robustness.

Dr. Qammer H. Abbasi

University of Glasgow, U.K.

Talk: Contactless Sensing for enabling in home monitoring

Human motion can be used to provide remote healthcare solutions for vulnerable people by identifying movements such as falls, gait and breathing disorders. This can allow people to live more independent lifestyles and still have the safety of being monitored if more direct care is needed. At present wearable devices can provide real time monitoring by deploying equipment on a person’s body. However, putting devices on a person’s body all the time make it uncomfortable and the elderly tends to forget it to wear as well in addition to the insecurity of being tracked all the time. The talk will provide overview of on-going research on contactless Sensing for remote monitoring in University of Glasgow

Mr. Habibullah Khan Nasar

Social Policy Analyst at UNDP

Talk: Mainstreaming, Acceleration and Policy Support (MAPs) for SDGs in Pakistan

Dr. Zartash Afzal Uzmi

Lahore University of Management Sciences, Lahore

Talk: Supporting Low-Latency Mobile Edge Applications via Control Plane Interventions

This talk will argue that the cellular control plane poses one major bottleneck in supporting mobile edge applications that require ultra-low latency (self-driving cars, AR/VR, multiplayer online gaming, remote surgery, among others). We will also present the design and performance of Neutrino, a newly designed cellular control plane that promises to address the latency caused by control plane procedures in the cellular packet core.

Mr. Waqas Aman Ullah

Vice President at Telenor

Talk: How fintech is shaping up our future

Dr. Syed Ali Hassan

School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, NUST

Talk: The 6G Wireless Networks: What to Expect and How to Excel

The demand for wireless capacity is continuously growing with the advent of the Internet-of-Everything system, connecting millions of people and billions of machines. To date, the fifth generation (5G) wireless networks are being rolled out in the world, providing a new vision to mobile communication. While 5G is still in its commercialization phase, the research on Beyond 5G (B5G) and sixth generation (6G) communication has already started ground work on innovative technologies that support the capacity growth of future networks with lower cost, energy consumption, and hardware complexity. In order to meet the stringent demands on spectral and energy efficiency, B5G and 6G will rely on new and advanced technologies ranging from cell-free massive MIMO, Terahertz band communication, pervasive artificial intelligence, ambient backscatter communications, to smart radio environments. In this talk, we discuss the basic concept of these technologies, covering the “what to expect” part, and then overview the research challenges that are seen to address their inception, the “How to excel” part.

Dr. Faisal Khan

Assistant Professor, COMSATS Abbottabad

Talk: Advances in Flux Switching Machine

Due to simple and robust structure, flux switching machines (FSMs) have been widely researched over the past few years. FSMs have double salient structure comprised of passive rotor and stator encompassing Armature Winding Slots (AWS), Field Winding Slots (FWS) and Permanent Magnets (PMs). Based on the presence of AWS, FWS and PMs, FSMs are classified into PM excited, Electrical excited and Hybrid excited. Among three categories of FSMs, Electrical excited FSMs offer lower power and torque densities whereas hybrid excited FSMs offer comparatively higher power and torque but due to presence of AWS, FWS and PMs on stator, the structure becomes highly complex and costly. Therefore, PM excited FSMs are considered competent candidates when higher torque density and power are primitive demand.

Permanent Magnet Flux Switching Machine (PMFSM) are potential candidates for brushless direct drive applications, in brushless alternating current mode, offering high torque and power density. PMFSMs housed both PMs and AWS in stator where alternate polarity PMs are sandwich between AWS. Such structure refrain PM demagnetization due to heat dissipation and impact of centrifugal force on PMs. However, PMFSM utilizes high rare-earth PM volume resulting higher machine cost and PM eddy current losses. Moreover, there is significant flux leakage from the stator which degrade electromagnetic performance analysis.

Based on structure, FSM’s are divided in to inner rotor FSM, outer rotor FSM, dual rotor FSM, and dual stator FSM. With main concern in simple robust inner rotor topologies, several PMFSM topologies are recently studied such as E-Core, C-Core, ?-shaped stator, multi-tooth, V-shaped and square envelope in literature. However, despite of the high PM volume usage and dominant stator leakage flux, E-Core and C-Core offer low overload capability, ?-shaped stator is complex in manufacturing and assembling, upper apex of modulation pole of multi-tooth may saturate due to narrow width, V-shape associate mechanical and electrical loading at the base of support between the V legs whereas square envelop offer low torque density in compare with conventional PMFSM. To compensate foregoing issues of more PM usage, flux leakages, machine weight, PM cost, flux circulation and cancellation associated with PMFSM, consequent pole PMFSM structure with partitioned PM i.e., Circumferential Magnetized PMs (CM-PMs) and Radial Magnetized PMs (RM-PMs) are recently investigated.

FSM is suitable candidate for high speed application such as:

Transportation system (EV/HEV implemented in Model S-plaid by tesla)
Renewable energies (wind turbine applications i.e. Siemens uses PM synchronous machines)
Aerospace industry (Multi stack axial machines in Rolls Royce aircrafts)
Rope-less Elevators
Electromagnetic launch technology
Electric bicycle

Dr. Muhammad Waqas

Assistant Professor, GIKI Swabi

Talk: Secure Emergency Information dissemination in vehicular Networks

According to a report by the world health organization, every year the lives of nearly 1.3 million people are lost as a result of road accidents around the world. To avoid such incidents, secure vehicular communication offers a promising solution. Vehicular communication includes a wide range of applications that can be broken down into two classes, i.e., safety and comfort applications. Safety applications include cooperative collision avoidance and traffic information. Comfort applications, provide value added services, such as infotainment, road conditions and environmental protection. Effective information dissemination constitutes the cornerstone of vehicular communication. The talk is based to reduce broadcast storm and secure communication that help us in the development of an effective emergency dissemination. The talk composed of a clustering technique which is one of the promising solutions to reduced overhead as well as intelligent reflecting surface to secure the communication. The technique is based on the mobility metrics to strengthen the cluster formation, avoid overhead, maintain the message reliability, and secure communication in a high mobility scenario.

Venue

BUITEMS Takattu Campus, Quetta, Pakistan

Balochistan University of Information Technology, Engineering and Management Sciences (BUITEMS), has given a new vision and distinct meaning to education. BUITEMS is located in Quetta, also called the fruit basket of Pakistan. Quetta is one of the most beautiful cities of Pakistan distinguished by the unique backdrop of mountains, beautiful lakes and fruit orchards in the outskirts.