FAST-National University lays special emphasis on the ability of the students to effectively communicate their professional abilities. In order to augment their soft skills—communication adeptness, leadership talent, and managerial capacity—LLC, established at the Karachi campus is equipped with twenty five work stations, provided for by state of the art hardware and most modern Interactive Language Software, and other allied pedagogical tools and techniques. The exquisitely furnished Centre affords students an opportunity to polish their language and communication skills both in English as well as foreign languages. Apart from offering lab sessions as course components of regular courses, i.e., English Language, the Centre also holds workshops, training courses, and activities in other Foreign Languages as well. The Centre also offers short courses for professionals from industry and students within in English and foreign languages like Arabic, Chinese, French, German and Korean.

This computer assisted language learning centre with video camera recording and discussion arenas, trains students in basic presentational skills, group discussions, interviews, communication and perception, creative and innovative thinking skills, etiquettes, public speaking, model speaking through movie sessions and live television programs, spoken English, phonetics and phonology, pronunciation, sound and spelling, stress and intonation, word focus, and Language Varieties( British and American).

www.linkedin.com/groups/Center-Research-in-Ubiquitous-Computing-4452137/about

Ubiquitous Computing (computing everywhere for everyone) promotes the idea of integrating computation into the environment, rather than having computers in daily life. The idea will enable people and machines to move around and interact with information and computing in informal way, to sense changes in their environment and to automatically adapt and act based on these changes

CRUC was established in March 2006 and has several faculty and student members including 10 Ph.D. fellows working on diverse projects and ideas within this domain. More than 40 research papers are published in International conferences and Journals by the Centre in last 2 years. The Centre has active collaboration with researchers and faculty members of universities of Australia, China, USA, UK and UAE. The Centre has funding by Microsoft and support from European Union, ICT R&D and HEC.

The CRUC has also offered several Doctoral and Graduate level courses to equip students with latest challenges of computer science. It is regularly arranging seminars and workshops on different areas where researchers present their ideas. At least one research conference is arranged at each year where graduating students present their findings.

Under the umbrella of Ubiquitous Computing, we are working in the areas of Augmented and Virtual Reality, Human Computer Interaction, Multi Agent Systems, Grid and Cloud Computing, Robotics & Sensor Networks, Workflow Systems, Provenance Systems and Agri Informatics.

Thesis/Projects:

Following are the on-going theses and projects at CRUC:

• A Framework for Multi Agent Systems in .NET Environment
• Sindhi & Arabic OCR System
• A Provenance System for Open Distributed Systems in Collaborative Environment
• AgriGrid: Context Aware Sensor Grid Framework for solving Agriculture Problems
• Designing Context-Aware Workflows
• Community Algorithm: Classification of Users and their Roles in a Community by their Level of Interaction
• Data Management Framework for MANETs and VANETs
• Automated User Interface Evaluation
• Building a Smart University using RFID Technology
• Wireless Sensors and Actuator Networks for Irrigation Control Systems
• Smart Workflows for Procurement
• XYLUS: Virtual Development on the Web
• FAST Ontology Builder
• CSCW Models for Project Management and HR Development
• Educational Frameworks in SecondLife.com
• VR Models in Minimally Invasive Surgery
• Soccer Playing Robots
• Socially Green Computing

Karachi is the hub of major business and economic activities in Pakistan. A large number of business centres and industries are spread all around the city. Karachi port, stock exchange and a cluster of multinational companies are providing unique opportunities of international trade and business here. Management Science Research Centre aims at providing a platform to offer research-based academic solutions of business and economics problems prevailing in today’s organizations. The centre has collaborations with local entrepreneurs and international companies.

Some of the activities of the Centre are:

Projects: Student members have picked up real life issues of business, economics, and banking etc. as their final year project to research and provide solutions of these problems

Seminars: various seminars have been conducted by foreign consultants, top managers of multinational companies, and other key personnel of different organizations

Workshops: Training workshops have been conducted in risk management, and total quality management.

Training and Development: The centre has provided the training to its students and faculty in most modern skill development areas

Business Games and Simulations: The centre is currently engaged in developing different business games and simulations to be utilized in classrooms teaching and assessment.

Case Study Development: Currently the centre is working on a number of case studies related to various pedagogical theories and practices to assist in learning and teaching.

The centre encourages faculty and students to take up research and provides them help to access organizational data, support, and other logistics to carry out research activities.

syslab.khi.nu.edu.pk

SysLab focuses on research and development of Cloud Systems, Internet-based distributed systems, and mobile applications. Research at SysLab is inspired by many considerations related to Security, Scalability, Quality of Service, Performance Enhancement, and Usability of these systems.

Motivated by recent advancements and popularity of Cloud Computing and High Performance Computing systems, SysLab also focuses on research and development of these two different but related domains. Cloud Computing can yield enhanced performance and usability for different mobile and Internet-based applications. Similarly, High Performance Computing can catalyze solution for many computational problems and yield increased performance for various applications. Further, technological advancements related to Smart city and Internet of Things, emergence of smart grid, and integration of mobile and cloud, has open new opportunities for research. SysLab team is concentrated on architecture and design of these systems and development of various applications which can benefit from emerging research technologies.

A few of the ongoing projects are listed below:

A few of the ongoing projects include volunteer Computing on heterogeneous platforms, Smart City and Smart grid, GPGPU Computing, Internet of Things, Bio Informatics over Cloud, Heterogeneous Parallel Computing, Cyber Security for Smart City, Multimedia Wireless Sensor Networks, Security in Smart phones, and Botnet detection and Mitigation. SysLab has received research grants from NVIDIA and IEEE TCPP. It is also Pakistan's first and only NVIDIA Research Centre.

The group focuses on multiple aspects related to machine learning, computer vision, data and text mining, and information retrieval.

Computer Vision focuses on giving machines the ability to understand visual input. The ability to automatically extract information from visual input finds its applications in video surveillance at airports, streets, banks, old homes, schools, in medical imaging to assist in diagnosis and surgeries, in human computer interaction (playing games, controlling computers with gestures, etc), in exploration of outer-space, and other areas of scientific research. Machine Learning provides exciting aspects for enhancement and automation.

The group also focuses on knowledge discovery from textual data. It is involved in extracting unstructured text, processing of information, converting into structural form for meta representation, associating semantics information, and performing innovative task specific processing. Some of the ongoing projects of the group include video surveillance, object classification and search, action activity recognition, and the analysis of crowded scenes. On the information retrieval side, the group is currently focused on Document clustering, Text summarization, Sentiment analysis, Named entity/event information mining, and web search and ranking. The algorithms and techniques proposed during last five years from the group received excellent citation from the research community.