Events 2010

 

A talk by Mr Syed Gilani – Accelerated Technology Private Limited
Title: Future Technological Trends in Embedded Markets"
Day & Date: Friday January 22, 2010
Time: 3:30 p.m.
Venue: A-6, LUMS, DHA, Lahore Cantt.

Speaker’s Brief Bio:
Syed Gilani is a founder of Accelerated Technology Private Limited, an embedded technology startup with R&D operations in Lahore, Pakistan. Recently Accelerated Technology Pvt. Ltd. was noted as the the largest Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) among technology ventures in Pakistan. Accelerated Technology was later acquired by Mentor Graphics, a publicly traded company at NASDAQ (MENT) and a leader in EDA industry with annual revenues approaching $1 Billion per annum.

Since being part of Mentor Graphics, Gilani has held various management positions. He was appointed as General Manager for it's PCB design product line with gross revenue of over $40 M. Under his management he helped the product line grow at 44% YoY.

Gilani holds a BSEE and MBA from University of South AL and has taken executive courses at Stanford University


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Tea sponsored by Mentor Graphics.

Seminar: Scalable Algorithms for Multiple Sequence Alignment in Computational Biology

Abstract:
Multiple Sequences Alignment (MSA) of biological sequences is a fundamental problem in computational biology due to its critical significance in wide ranging applications including haplotype reconstruction, sequence homology, phylogenetic analysis, and prediction of evolutionary origins. The MSA problem is considered NP-hard and known heuristics for the problem do not scale well with increasing number of sequences. On the other hand, with the advent of new breed of fast sequencing techniques such as pyrosequencing/solexa it is now possible to generate large number of sequences very quickly and can reach upto a million sequences. For rapid sequence analysis, it is therefore desirable to develop fast MSA algorithms that scale well with the increase in the dataset size. In this talk, we discuss a novel domain decomposition based technique to solve the MSA problem on multiprocessing platforms. The domain decomposition based technique, in addition to yielding better quality, gives enormous advantage in terms of execution time and memory requirements. The proposed strategy allows to decrease the time complexity of any known heuristic of O(N)^x complexity by a factor of O(1/p)^x, where N is the number of sequences, x depends on the underlying heuristic approach, and p is the number of processing nodes. In particular, we discuss a highly scalable algorithm, Sample-Align-D, for aligning biological sequences using Muscle system as the underlying heuristic. The algorithm is proposed to be implemented on a cluster of workstations using MPI library. Experimental results for different problem sizes are analyzed in terms of quality of
alignment, execution time and speed-up.

Bio:
Ashfaq A. Khokhar received his M.S. in computer engineering from Syracuse University, in 1989 and Ph.D. in computer engineering from University of Southern California, in 1993. After his Ph.D., he spent two years as a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Sciences and School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University. In 1995, he joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Delaware, where he first served as Assistant Professor and then as Associate Professor. In Fall 2000, Dr. Khokhar joined UIC in the Department of Computer Science and Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, where he currently serves on the rank of Professor.

Dr. Khokhar has published over 180 technical papers and book chapters in refereed conferences and journals in the areas of wireless networks, multimedia systems, data mining, and high performance computing. He is a recipient of the NSF CAREER award in 1998. His paper entitled "Scalable S-to-P Broadcasting in Message Passing MPPs" has won the Outstanding Paper award in the International Conference on Parallel Processing in 1996. He has served as the Program Chair of the 17th Parallel and Distributed Computing Conference (PDCS), 2004, Vice Program Chair for the 33rd International Conference on Parallel Processing (ICPP), 2004, and Program Chair of the IEEE Golbecomm Symposium on Adhoc and Sensor Networks, 2009.

He is a Fellow of IEEE for his contributions to multimedia computing and databases.

His research interests include: wireless and sensor networks, multimedia systems, data mining, and high performance computing.
 

Meeting Title: An Afternoon With Prof. Asad Abidi

Meeting Description:

A meeting with Professor Asad Abidi was arranged with the members of the Executive Committee IEEE Lahore Section. The agenda was to discuss the Electrical Engineering Curriculum. Prof. Abidi also discussed issues in teaching courses such as electronics and circuits and systems, and how. He shared his plans of host a training workshop for the teachers of these courses at the end of the yea.

Biography: Asad A. Abidi received the B.Sc.(Hons.) degree from Imperial College, London in 1976 and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley in 1978 and 1981. He was at Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ from 1981 to 1984 as a Member of Technical Staff in the Advanced LSI Development Laboratory. Since 1985, he has been at the Electrical Engineering Department of the University of California, Los Angeles where he is Professor. He was a Visiting Faculty Researcher at Hewlett Packard Laboratories during 1989. His research interests are in the design of CMOS RF integrated circuits, high-speed analog circuits, and data converters. Dr. Abidi served as the Program Secretary for the International Solid-State Circuits Conference from 1984 to 1990 and as General Chairman of the Symposium on VLSI Circuits in 1992. He was Secretary of the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Council from 1990 to 1991, and from 1992 to 1995 he was Editor of the IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits. He has received the 1988 TRW Award for Innovative Teaching and the 1997 IEEE Donald G. Fink Award, and is co-recipient of the Best Paper Award at the 1995 European Solid-State Circuits Conference, the Jack Kilby Best Student Paper Award at the 1996 International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC), the Jack Raper Award for Outstanding Technology Directions Paper at the 1997 ISSCC, and the Design Contest Award at the 1998 Design Automation Conference, and the 2001 ISLPED Low Power Design Contest Award. In 2007, the UCLA School of Engineering and Applied Science recognized him with the Lockheed-Martin Award for Excellence in Teaching. He has received an IEEE Millennium Medal, is a Fellow of the IEEE, and was named one of the top ten contributors to the ISSCC. He is the recipient of the 2008 IEEE Donald O. Pederson Award in Solid-State Circuits. Dr. Abidi is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering.

Born to Innovate

Meeting Description:

Seminar by Engineer Shabbir Khan

Abstract:
Human species has always confronted real difficult problems on every turn of history, some of these were pretty intractable - ready to threaten the very existence of all life on this earth. Although we were successful in overcoming our past challenges, we as as species face much bigger problems today. These new problems can be solved only by adopting entirely new ways of thinking, inventing novel solutions, and deploying these innovations.

The talk is intended for people from all walks of life. The speaker has a BSEE from UET Lahore, MIM/MBA from Thunderbird Campus Glendale AZ, and a Master in Public Health (MPH) degree from UCLA.

Workshop on 'Teaching the Teachers – Basics of Circuit Theory’

Meeting Description:

To the electronics industry's frustration, the supply of engineers well-grounded in a breadth of
circuits is dwindling with time. It may be that a weak exposure in the first circuits classes turns
off electrical engineering undergraduates from specializing in this area. This workshop will be
primarily directed towards teachers of undergraduate courses in basic circuit theory that
are part of a standard EE curriculum. Its purpose is to bring to this teaching a new unification
of the subject, and to help the teachers arm the student with first principles that explain how, and
why, circuits (active or passive, analog or digital, discrete or integrated) work as they do.
The instructor will provide insights gathered from his own practice of analog and RF circuit
design, as well as from his vast distinguished teaching career, that are not found in textbooks.
The course attendees are expected to take back into their own classrooms this form of teaching
and its content. A familiarity with the traditional syllabus will make the attendees see the point of
this workshop.