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Thursday March 28, 2024

With state-of-the-art projects,NED students try to break the market

Karachi A drone was ready to take flight from the corridors of the Department of Computer & Information Systems (CIS) at the NED University of Engineering and Technology as a group of student showcased their pilot project on Saturday morning at the Annual Poster Exhibition. Syed Noor Ali Jafri along

By Najam Soharwardi
November 08, 2015
Karachi
A drone was ready to take flight from the corridors of the Department of Computer & Information Systems (CIS) at the NED University of Engineering and Technology as a group of student showcased their pilot project on Saturday morning at the Annual Poster Exhibition.
Syed Noor Ali Jafri along with his group mates demonstrated the Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV), commonly known as drones, stealing the attention from other projects.
Explaining the thought behind his project, Jafri said, “The UAVs are not only limited to military purposes, but can also be utilised in the civil sector. In this project we have focused on one of the applications of the UAVs in the civil sector, that is, transmitting a real-time video stream to the ground station.
He said the UAV built by his team was capable of transferring real-time video feed to the ground station along with other stats. “The software designed is capable of recording these stats and storing them for flight record keeping. This project can also be extended for real-time image processing, live face recognition and other various applications,” said Kiran Khan, another member of the group.
The big challenges
Talking to The News, CIS chairman Dr Shehzad Hasan said students put in their best efforts to come up with innovative ideas but they faced a host of challenges due to a grave dearth of resources and the conditions of the city.
“We focus on designing projects which can become commercial successes but the government and the investors should also give us room to work so that we also pursue research-based projects which require a lot of patience and commitment,” he said.
“Though the situation is comparatively better since the government and some private sector financers are helping us establishing new laboratories and accessing to latest technologies, more is required to make our students reach the international market with their unique projects.”
The chairman said local industries could not stand on their feet to produce computer hardware in Pakistan and students were compelled to import devices and machine parts which was tough.
“Our students are even scared of bringing their laptops to the university due to rampant snatching and mugging. There are various social and financial issues with them, yet they have showcased some of the best works of engineering.”
The incharge of the project exhibition and a senior teacher, Shahab Tehzeeb, said that most projects were linked with internet and their productivity depend greatly on how soon the society got easy access to speedy internet services working round the clock and on every location.
“The 3G and 4G services are transforming our life styles. If we have to compete with the developed countries, we would have to maximize our efficiency and productivity through adopting the latest technologies.”
Interesting projects
Fahad Azeem’s group designed a module which could control satellite cameras by controlling their rotation, both clockwise and anti-clockwise, in order to capture an image.
“This unit transfers image data from the cameras and then packetises it further by applying error checking and sequence numbering on it,” said Fahad.
Munir Ahemd Javed’s group developed a software based on natural language processing for retrieving information from Urdu News Corpus. It takes news text as input and then processes it to extract main entities and to find key words to know the extent to which the news is positive or negative.
Sarah Khalid tried to made life easy by developing an app for resolving compatibility issues when transferring data files among different operating systems.
In her project, Hiba Ilyas allowed patients to know their oxygen levels, blood pressure, heart beat rates and etc just by putting their fingers on a device which would automatically send the readings to their doctors.
Talha Jamil introduced a parent surveillance system through which parents could track the location of their children through mobiles, know about their activities and block any number or service on their phones.
The app would remain hidden in the mobile and if the internet disconnects, the mobile would be still be under the parents’ control though GSM service.
Shaheer Abbas showcased his idea through which a predefined vocabulary of Sindhi language could be translated into Urdu language.
Externals
An executive director of a private firm, Asad Ur Rehman, opined that students had worked hard to come up with good ideas but they needed more guidance to turn their ideas into practical projects.
He lamented that there were no constructive forces working in the country to help these ideas reach corridors of the international market.
Salman Jafri of Usman Institute of Technology was more optimistic about the projects. He said the ideas were novel and had the potential to make their own place in the market.