Umar Saif
Associate Professor
Computer Science and Engineering

LUMS School of Science and Engineering,
Opposite Sector U, DHA, Lahore,
Pakistan

umarATmitDOTedu

umarATlumsDOTeduDOTpk
umarDOTsaifATcantabDOTnet

   

News

New Scientist: Poor Man's Broadband has a Turn of Speed

Project Demos: Watch applications of Goal-oriented Network Sockets [Follow-Me-Video] and Goal-oriented Programming [Adaptive Teleconference]

Press Release: Microsoft Research funds first project in Pakistan

BBC News: Computers to be Oxygen of Future

DS Online: Universities Focus on Pervasive Computing research

Research | Publications | Teaching | Activities | Bio
 

  Research


I am broadly interested in Computer Systems, including Networks, Operating Systems, Distributed Systems, Languages and Mobile Computing. It turns out that real systems typically transcend these traditional boundaries -- my research is often at the intersection of these areas. Most of my recent research has been in an area called Ubiquitous (or Pervasive) Computing, with the aim to make computing natural and unobtrusive, like Oxygen. I now believe that computing can be pervasive only when the "other four billion" have access to it -- leading to my current research focus on using ICT for Development (ICTD) in the Third-World.

I lead the NEWT lab at LUMS and Dritte.org. A few interesting projects are listed below. Corresponding publications are available here.

Ubiquitous Computing
 
Developing-world Technologies
 
Systems

  Goal-oriented Systems

Goal-oriented systems accept an underspecified user intent and try to automatically satisfy the intent by adapting implementation choices at runtime. Examples: [Follow-Me-Video] and [Adaptive Teleconference]

  Home Area Networks

Home networks enable interaction and programming of electric appliances to automate daily household tasks.

 

 

 

 

   Developing-world Networks

Poor man's broadband is a p2p dial-up network for bypassing the slow Internet links in the developing-world. Our p2p data exchange layer exploits the unused bandwidth on the last-mile in the developing-world (resulting in a speed-up of two or three times the typical Internet bandwidth available in the developing-world).

   Developing-world Computer

Teleputer is a cell-phone-based "$10" computer designed specifically to improve the productivity of people living in the rural and semi-urban developing-regions. Instead of lowering the cost of a traditional PC, Teleputer enables a cell-phone to interact with the physical world using sensors and actuators.

 

 

  Gigabit Routing

MIT RAW Network Router is a purely software router which achieves four times the performance of IXP1200 by cleverly programming RAW's multiple processors, on-chip networks and software exposed I/O pins:

  Social Networking

Social Networking is currently an offline acitivity. BumpIn.com makes social networking live. BumpIn is supported by a highly available, scalable and fault-tolerant cluster architecture: