Affiliated Labs

• Digital Pakistan Lab – CEME, NUST, Rawalpindi

The goal of the Digital Pakistan Lab is to create a platform where multiple tools will be developed for multiple domains involving both commercial and non-commercial entities so that they can use these services effectively. Our scientific goal is to create innovation ecosystem based on applied R&D network of partners in government, industry, and academia. The hardest problem is the user’s commitment to digitize, lack of customized data analytics platform specific for national needs, ensuring security and secrecy of data. The lab will work to overcome these issues in Pakistan and will set a course for other initiatives as well to achieve the objectives of Vision 2025.

• Distributed Computing Lab – LUMS

The fourth industrial revolution will be marked by the fusion of digital, physical, and biological worlds, ranging from wearables for health monitoring, AR/VR based virtual classrooms, remote surgery over 5G cellular networks, massive sensing for mission-critical applications with IoTs, and the use of custom deep learning models across a wide range of applications. This fusion will be enabled by technologies such as AR/VR, IoTs, 5G, and robotics and AI, all of which require a highly available distributed cloud infrastructure for delivering ultra-low latency and high bandwidth to users. The goal of our lab is to realize this vision in order to help Pakistan gain a competitive edge in the world. To this end, we will design and develop a massively distributed cloud infrastructure comprising tens of thousands of mini-datacenters, possibly located at cellular base stations and or POPs. We posit that such a cloud infrastructure, available in the form of a ‘pay-as-you-go’ model, will offer a unique opportunity for Pakistan to build the next-generation of products and startups. We will focus on four key application areas that will be directly enabled by having a edge computing based cloud model.

• Language Engineering Lab – UET Lahore

The Language Data Engineering Lab at Al-Khawarizmi Institute of Computer Science (KICS), University of Engineering and Technology (UET) Lahore aims to build an ecosystem for Urdu based content and analytics services to empower Pakistani citizens for their socio-economic benefit and enable business and government for strategic decision making.

This goal is proposed to be achieved through four distinct objectives: (i) Providing effective access to online and additional Urdu content, (ii) Releasing Urdu language processing toolkit for accelerating research and development of Urdu language technology, (iii) Delivering data analytics based on local users and local content for improving decision making for business and e-governance, and (iv) Making available specific cloud based services using the Urdu data analytics available to address current academic and public requirements.

• Exascale Open Data Lab – NED UET, Karachi

Exascale OpenLab is a unique public private partnership concept which will provide framework through which NEDUET can collaborate with leading ICT companies and national and international academia to accelerate the development and deployment of the cutting edge ICT solutions related to big data and its analytics on cloud using Open source platforms.

The idea is to establish a platform for open collaboration first of its kind in Pakistan. Two of the labs successfully operating on the similar concept are CERN OpenLab and Huawei OpenLab. Focusing towards both academia and industry to meetup on a single point and adopt the fast growing machine learning and data analytics techniques in no time. Such platform has the potential to increase the reproducibly of experiments by linking publications, software, data and workflows with validated identifiers from reputable and tested community maintained repertoires.

• Precision Medicine Lab – CECOS – FAST NU

The Precision Medicine Lab will be a first of its kind cross-disciplinary effort in Pakistan that will allow data analysts and deep learning experts to work very closely with biologists, geneticists and clinicians and establish Pakistan’s first genomics database and will set the stage for larger more concerted efforts in whole genome sequencing. The Lab will also produce novel software tools that will help in side-effects prediction of drugs that are in use currently in the country, drug repurposing that may lead to drug discovery for challenging and traditionally neglected diseases (like Dengue, Tuberculosis, Hepatitis, etc.) and literature mining to help oncologists. Having the largest private hospital (with an Oncology department, and the Center for Genomic Sciences) on board means translation and clinical application will be seamless which not only means enhance healthcare outcomes but also continuous feedback and improvement of these tools in an iterative manner.

• Video Surveillance Lab – PNEC (NUST) & FAST NU (Karachi)

Video surveillance is being used across the globe for safety and security aspects. The video feeds in the control room have exceptional amount of information. It is indeed a big challenge for human observers to monitor multiple surveillance camera feeds in real-time. Further, it is extremely hectic and time consuming to identify the event of interest from thousands of hours of videos. In order to cater such surveillance challenges there is a need for intelligent vision-based research solutions that can provide visual content analysis and increase the effectiveness of the surveillance system operation.

• Sustainable Energy Informatics Lab – LUMS

Throughout the world, energy sector planners and policy makers are moving towards more and more distributed renewable power generation sources. These sources present different challenges for grid integration and require a new type of grid commonly known as the smart grid. A key aspect of the smart grid is communicating, storing, querying and analyzing massive quantities of data that is generated from its key components. In fact, data from the smart grid is expected to be so enormous that smart grids are set to constitute the largest data network after the Internet. It is understood that Pakistan’s power sector is not ready to handle the massive data that is the key to any large-scale smart grid deployment. By properly utilizing smart grid data we could significantly reduce the costs associated with power systems. For example, this data could be utilized for developing long, medium and short-term demand forecasting. Accurate long and medium-term demand forecasting lead to least-cost energy planning while short term demand forecasting helps efficient system operation and significantly reduces T&D losses, saving millions of Rupees.

• Predictive Analytics Lab – SZABIST (ISB, KHI)

Data analysis forms the foundation of many modes of research ranging from scientific discoveries to governmental findings. With the advent of machine intelligence and neural networks, extracting and modeling, approaching data has been unimpeachably altered. These changes, seemingly small, affect the way societies organize themselves, deliver services, or interact with each other. The development of Predictive Analytics Lab (PA Lab) under the Umbrella of Center for Data Analytics & Cloud Computing (CDC) is planned in general as research and development Lab to solve the societal problems of the country by developing state-of-the art solutions in the field of Data Science and Analytics. The PA Lab shall act as a pivot of many academic and industry players to target the following goals: (i) High Value Services for Society; (ii) Commercialization; (iii) Capacity Building; and (iv) Sustainable economic growth and contributing towards a knowledge economy.

• Precision Agriculture and Analytics Lab – UAF (Faisalabad)

The main objective of the Precision Agriculture and Analytics Lab (PAAL) will be to utilize big data analytics for agricultural research & education, technology development and dissemination. It will bring forward cutting edge precision agriculture and modelling; bioinformatics and climate science; big data analytics and outreach to reach one common objective of sustain-ably increasing agricultural productivity.

• Crime Investigation and Prevention Lab – ITU (Lahore)

Law and order is a key characteristic of progressive civilized societies. It is a fundamental responsibility of the government to provide a safe and orderly environment that is implemented through various departments and agencies. Due to its unique geopolitical landscape, law and order has remained a pressing issue for Pakistan. Prevalent procedures for crime investigation and prevention are slow and outdated. We believe that the vast amount of structured and unstructured data available today is a gold mine. Unfortunately, sufficient human and technical resources do not exist in government departments and agencies to effectively utilize this data. The proposed Crime Investigation and Prevention Lab (CIPL) at ITU will provide a platform for research, development, and implementation of data-driven solutions for (1) Crime pattern discovery and optimal surveillance, (2) Evidence gathering and suspect identification, (3) Speech Forensics, and (4) Vulnerability analysis and crime prediction. To this end, the lab plans to assemble experts in Data Science, Speech & Audio Processing, Criminology, Sociology, and Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs) to build a modern law and order hub in the region. For instance, automatic processing of recorded speech and audio data (recorded phone calls, conversations etc.) could augment threat preemption, crime prevention and investigation processes using techniques like keyword spotting, speech recognition and speaker identification.

• Data Acquisition, Processing & Predictive Analytics – Ziauddin University

Due to law and order situation and adverse climate changes arising not only in Pakistan but across the world, it is important to explore innovative tools before the problem hits the deck. With better planning, proactive strategy, viable design, compatible infrastructure and active monitoring these issues may be controlled or at least tackled genially, hence, leaving a better & safe living environment for generations to come.

With the motive to acquire data, store and process it to be available for the analysis and examination to provide a knowledge base for data scientists as well as for law enforcement personnel/agencies. Ziauddin University mission is to participate in EOI published by HEC for Research lab in the domain of Data Acquisition and Processing lab. This lab shall serve as the capacity building platform in technical expertise required for big data acquisition and processing. On the other hand, the lab will strive to develop high-end data storage facility to aid the  of future IoT application.

• Data Analytics Lab – UETP

Our focus is to effectively utilize cloud computing for Big Data applications for solution to problems of national importance. With support of cloud computing resource limited resource devices can perform heavy data services to store, edit, generate, process and communicate media files such as audio, video, images, graphics and so on, even without large storage and computation power. Therefore, keeping in view the advantages of cloud computing in provisioning and processing of big data and its suitability for the emerging trend in mobile devices and Pakistani R&D environment having limited hardware resources, the utility of the cloud computing is plausible.