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Research at Islamabad
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Centre for Agri-Informatics Research (C@IR) |
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www.nu.edu.pk/cair/cairindex.aspx |
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Agriculture is the backbone of our economy, and IT has been identified by the President of Pakistan to be "at the heart of the economic revival of Pakistan". Agro-Informatics is a blend of these two important disciplines i.e. a win-win combination. More formally, Agro-informatics is the development and application of proven Information Technology (IT), Statistics and Mathematics techniques in agriculture, for better agricultural output. |
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Established in 2004 under the patronage of Dr. Amir Muhammad, former Agriculture Minister and an eminent agriculture scientist of international repute, the Centre for Agro-Informatics Research (C@IR) is poised to take the lead as one of the first research centres of its type, aimed at the emerging discipline of Agro-Informatics. In this regard PTCL R&D Fund has recently approved a 26 month long Rs. 30+ Millions project to C@IR for establishing an Agriculture Data Warehouse that will be used for data mining, forecasting and data analysis for solving agriculture related problems. |
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The work done at C@IR has been recognized nationally. Last year head C@IR received the IT Excellence award in the category of "IT R&D" for 2004 by NCR Pakistan and Dr. M. N. Prize in Computer Sciences for 2005 by the Pakistan Academy of Sciences. |
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The work done at C@IR is recognized internationally too, by very high ranking on the world’s most popular internet search engine i.e. www.google.com. Searching Google on 6th May 2006 using generic keywords of data mining agriculture returned 27.4 million hits or references, with the 3rd top hit being the work done at C@IR. |
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Machine Intelligence Group (MInG) |
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This group is conducting research on theoretical aspects and practical applications in various fields of computational and machine intelligence (neural networks, evolutionary algorithms, etc.). It is focused on bringing together the expertise from the fields of machine learning, computational intelligence, image processing, data mining, and multi-agents to design and develop practical intelligent systems. Priority is given to applications related and suited to Pakistani environment. |
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The group is supervising several PhD and MS theses and undergraduate projects. |
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Projects & Theses |
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Data Mining algorithms applied to economic and climatic data of Pakistan |
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Urdu offline handwritten character recognition |
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Automatic recognition of Pakistani sign language for deaf and dumb |
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Intelligent distance education system |
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Software Engineering Research Center (SERC) |
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The objectives of this centre are to carry out research and development in software engineering and allied application areas. The centre promotes theoretical research in the software engineering area, resolve problems faced by the software industry, and helps establish software engineering practices in the industry. Through SERC, the University seeks to help and support the local software industry in establishing and improving their processes and practices through continuous feedback and training. SERC aims to achieve these objectives by collecting the industry data to understand productivity, cost, and quality parameters. This will hopefully also help in developing more suitable process and lifecycle models for different types of projects being undertaken by our local industry in the offshore and distributed environment. Software Architecture, Software Project Management, Software Quality and Process Improvement are main areas of research. |
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Activities and Achievements |
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There are eight PhD research students registered with the group and pursuing their graduate level studies. One MS thesis completed and other two are at the writing of thesis in the area of software project management and software architecture. |
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Projects Completed |
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Virtual Office: A system enables the people to manage their offices (computer systems running back in the offices/anywhere) while they are on the move or away (through mobile or ordinary telephone). The project won the 3rd prize in NESCON ’05 held on March 19-20, 2005. |
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On-going Projects |
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Tracing Back Software Architectural Decisions and Requirement |
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Multi-agent systems |
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Software Project Management Methodology |
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Next Generation Intelligent Networks Research Center (NeXGIN RC) |
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Visit: www.nexginrc.org |
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NeXGIN RC is established at the Islamabad campus to conduct state-of-the-art research in different domains of Next Generation Networks (NGn): Security, Quality of Service (QoS), Convergence of the fixed and mobile networks with a special focus on IMS and 3 GPP. Application of wireless sensor networks in Tele-medicine and secure Mobiles OS. Our academia-industry collaborative research efforts have culminated in three research projects worth more than PKR 34 million funded by ICT R&D fund.
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AIS Based Intrusion Detection System |
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The aim of this project is to develop general-purpose AIS based, open-source, windows based Intrusion Detection System, which must be able to: |
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Recognize previously unknown malware of all types. |
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This includes, but not limited to file infectors, boot-sector infectors, macro viruses, Trojans and other Malware. |
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Must also be able to detect and stop/filter traffic floods launched by any other compromised hosts in the network. |
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It is a requirement of the system that the new IDS must not require updating in its signature database to detect new viruses. |
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This project is funded by a PKR 10.9 million grant from the National ICT R&D fund, Government of Pakistan, over the period of 3 years (2008-2010). |
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Remote Patient Monitoring Systems with Focus on Antenatal Care |
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The primary objective of this project is to develop a reliable, efficient and easily deployable remote patient monitoring system that can play a vital role in providing basic health services to the remote village population of Pakistan at their door step. As a result, the patients no longer need to travel long distances to reach to the nearest basic health units and then just be examined by a mere GP. The project will identify the most important issues in the design of a remote health care monitoring system and will develop a low cost solution, which will be provided to the lady health workers (LHWs) for this purpose. |
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Presently, the antenatal care is being provided by little-educated lady health visitors who perform all the steps of patient care manually. They take readings of patient’s physiological data using instruments which are difficult to handle and require manual tuning etc. Then, they record this data into printed forms manually. Finally, the collected forms are sent to a doctor who goes through all of them looking for any symptom of abnormality. The doctor then takes decision regarding the patient’s treatment. |
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The goal of the project is |
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To design a generic remote health care system with a focus on antenatal care. |
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To use advancements in Information and Communication Technology (ICT) to develop a monitoring system that could enhance the quality of health care provided by the lady health workers. |
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Project is funded by National ICT R&D fund for the period of three years (2008 - 2010) and the total budget of this project is 14.597223 million PKR |
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A Bio-Inspired Self-Defending Security Framework for IP Multimedia Subsystem |
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The IP Multimedia System (IMS) is a standard Next Generation Networking (NGN) architecture for media-services capable Internet. IMS can be defined as a global, access independent, standards-based IP connectivity and service control architecture that enables various types of multimedia services to end-users using common internet-based protocols. The aim of this project is to develop an intelligent Bio-inspired self-defending security framework for IMS and Next Generation All-IP Networks. This framework will address the different vulnerabilities like SIP protocol vulnerabilities, IMS framework-related vulnerabilities, VoIP/ Video/ PoC/ Messaging/ Presence/ Conferencing application vulnerabilities; and voice spam, media plane related vulnerabilities. |
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This framework is expected to become a cardinal component that will protect against the misuse of the network resources of an operator. This framework will be integrated into any IMS converged network infrastructure to provide defense against wide varieties of attacks. The key benefits of this project are: |
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The solution will propose a self-healing self-defining real time security open-source solution for IMS that can not only detect unique vulnerabilities identified in IMS but also counter them in real time for IMS architecture and Next Generation All-IP Networks. |
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The techniques and methodologies developed during this project are expected to lure several enterprises and network service providers to invest in startups and can use the solution product as a base for further development. |
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This project will attract network operator’s subscriptions that are using IMS architecture for application convergence. These subscriptions will be used for getting feedback for potential scaling and improvement. |
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The resultant software of this project will help to increase the confidence of the national researchers working in the area of computer security, and can make Pakistan as one of the leaders in creating expertise in IMS security. |
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Project is funded by National ICT R&D fund for the period of three years (2008 - 2010) and the total budget of this project is 9.7 million PKR. |
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