Invited Speakers
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The impossible has become achievable in Africa due to the fastest growth in mobile telecommunication industry. Africa the second biggest mobile market has sparked a number of digital innovations, with diverse applications in the sector of education, health, ICT, agriculture, governance, finance, energy and tourism. The rapid growth of Tech hubs in Africa gives birth to digital entrepreneurship ecosystem by networking entrepreneurs, designers, developers and prospective investors. The production of cattle in Africa has barriers to it appearing in the form of cattle diseases such as Foot and Mouth (FMD), quarter evil, anthrax, and contagious abortion. Once attacked by these diseases, cattle are usually seen to possess particular signs and symptoms of diseases, showing a more pronounced effect and in such a case it may be late to treat the suffering cattle for such diseases. The conventional way of telling the health status of a cow involves observation by farmers or guardians of the animals by visual inspection which is the case in Africa in both diagnosis for diseases and observing the cow for heat period. The proposed system is intended for practice in Africa to observe conditions in the life of cattle such as temperature, heart rate, rumen pH which can be used to deliver the health condition of a cow. In addition, the system is autonomous, easy to install, highly scalable and has a relatively high sampling rate which improves the temporal resolution of the monitoring process. The system is aimed at helping farmers in Africa to perform real time diagnosis and detection of diseases and predicting the most suitable times for artificial production of cow off-springs through methods such as artificial insemination.
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Abid Yahya began his career on an engineering path, which is rare among other researcher executives, he earned his bachelor's degree from University of Engineering and Technology, Peshawar, Pakistan in Electrical and Electronic Engineering majoring in telecommunication and MSc and PhD degrees in wireless and mobile systems from the Universiti Sains Malaysia, Malaysia. Currently, he is working at the Botswana International University of Science and Technology. He has applied this combination of practical and academic experience to a variety of consultancies for major corporations. He has more than 115 research publications to his credit in numerous reputable journals, conference articles, and book chapters. He has received several awards and grants from various funding agencies and supervised a number of PhD and master candidates. His recent two books, 1) Steganography Techniques for Digital Images; 2) LTE-A Cellular Networks: Multi-Hop Relay for Coverage, Capacity and Performance Enhancement, was published by Springer International Publishing in July 2018 January 2017 respectively and are being followed in national and international universities. Professor Yahya was assigned to be an external and internal examiner for postgraduate students. He has been invited a number of times to be a speaker or visiting lecturer at different multinational companies. He sits on various panels with the government and other industry-related panels of study.
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Cyber physical systems and internet of things (IoT) has received considerable and growing attention in recent years due to its potential, to radically change our daily lives. There is almost no application domain where IoT cannot find application. Deployment of any IoT network forms an immense smart network comprised of people, information sensing devices, distributed systems along with intelligence to make all these entities work in coordination. Centralized and distributed intelligence is required for automated decision making after information gathering. Machine Learning (ML) is a sub-discipline of Information and Communication Technology (ICT), that develops the means for machines/devices to recognize and learn patterns, infer or extract useful information from stored data and predict future behaviors. Machine learning is pervasive and can play a key role in all stages of today’s smart networks; from data analysis to behavior prediction. As IoT is just making every single device/machine/network to be smart and Machine Learning can make this happen. In this talk, I will discuss various smart applications incorporating machine learning algorithms. I will also discuss state of the art research in this area and identify potential research directions. Different tools and platforms available in this regard, in research /industry will also be part of this talk.
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Dr. Hussain received her PhD and MASc. degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Ryerson University, Toronto; where she was affiliated with the WINCORE lab. Upon graduation she joined the Network-Centric Applied Research Team (N-CART) as a post-doctoral fellow where she continues to work on various NSERC-funded industrial projects in the realm of the Internet of Things (IoT). Dr. Hussain has worked as a limited term assistant professor in the School of Computer Science at University of Guelph. She is also an adjunct professor in the Department of Computer Science at Ryerson University where her role includes teaching, mentoring and supervision of undergraduate and graduate projects. Dr. Hussain is also a technical advisor for the Toronto-based firm “Locate Motion”, providing solutions in e-health domain. She has more than 8 years of teaching and research experience in Toronto and overseas. Her research interests include machine-to-machine communication, Internet of Things, machine learning, 5G security. She is a prolific author with various conference and journal publications on her credit. She is editor for IEEE WIE newsletter (Toronto section) and associate editor for the IEEE newsletter in Future Directions, IEEE newsletter in Technology Policy & Ethics and for the International Journal of Research Innovations in Computer Networks (IJRICN).
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The realms below the surface of the seas are a place scarcely utilized. The physical properties of the medium make electromagnetic communications useless for medium distances. Acoustic propagation is needed to reach distances beyond a few tens of meters. However, the bandwidth available is quite constrained, the transmission requires more power, and the channel causes significant complications, such as fading, Doppler effects and variation of the propagation speed. Transmission of data under these conditions is quite demanding, even more for quasi real time video where several other factors contribute to the overall performance. The choice of control access mechanism is one of these factors, causing an impact in the end-to-end delay, as well as on the maximum data rate that can be achieved. Optimal use of capacity can be achieved by using spatial multiplexing schemes. The scheduling of transmissions from the different nodes can be is an NP problem that can be solved analytic and geometrically. Fairness can be considered, as well as priority for specific services. On top of this transmission infrastructure, services such as video monitoring can be deployed. It can be shown that the Quality of Experience (QoE) can reach values in the medium range if proper compression parameters are selected. However, current ITU video assessment models, such as G.1070, can’t be applied to these video transmissions, and new models must be derived.
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Dr. Javier Poncela received the M.Sc. degree in Telecommunications Engineering from the Polytechnic University of Madrid, Spain, in 1994 and the Ph.D., degree from the University of Málaga, Spain. He also holds a MBA degree. Dr. Poncela worked in Alcatel Spacio before joining the University of Málaga in 1995, where he is currently Associate Professor. He did his PhD on methodologies for efficient development of complex communications systems. He has actively collaborated with multinational companies (Nokia, Cetecom GmbH, AT4wireless, Ingenia) on formal modeling and system testing in Bluetooth, 3G and satellite systems. Currently, his interests are in underwater communication networks, analysis of end-to-end performance, and models for the evaluation of QoE. He has participated in more than 10 research projects, co-authoring more than 50 publications, 23 of them in JCR journals. He has been co-editor of special issues in journal Wireless Personal Communications. Dr. Poncela has been coordinator of Master on Telematics and Communication Networks for six years and since 2012 serves as Deputy Dean for International Relations in ETSIT. He also coordinates international Mobility Programs Erasmus+ KA107 between University of Malaga and Universities in Pakistan and France. He is co-founder of the Applied Communications Engineering for underwater (ACEuw) R&D group.
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Access-driven Cache Side-Channel Attacks (CSCAs) are strong cryptanalysis techniques that break cryptographic algorithms by targeting their implementations. In recent years, Intel’s x86 architecture has been exposed to high-resolution and stealthy SCAs such as: Flush+Reload, Flush+Flush, Prime+Probe, Spectre and Meltdown. Despite valiant efforts, mitigation techniques against such SCAs are not very effective. This is mainly because of two reasons: 1) Most mitigation techniques usually protect against any given specific vulnerability and do not take a system-wide approach, and 2) they either completely remove or greatly reduce the performance benefits of resource sharing. In this talk, I will provide arguments in favor of a need-based protection approach, i.e., to apply mitigation only after successful detection of a CSCA, in order to create equilibrium between security needs and performance benefits of modern computing systems. Detection can serve as the first line of defense against such attacks. However, for detection-based protection strategy to be effective, detection needs to be highly accurate, should incur minimum system overhead at run-time, should cover a large set of attacks and should be capable of early-stage detection, i.e., before the attack completes. To support this argument, I will present some recent experiments and results in this talk on the detection of state-of-the-art CSCAs, such as; Flush+Reload, Flush+Flush and Prime+Probe, using real-time HPC data from Intel’s x86 hardware and machine learning models.
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Dr. Khurram Bhatti is the Director of Embedded Computing Laboratory (ECLab-ITU) and an Assistant Professor at Information Technology University (ITU), Lahore, Pakistan. He is one of the very few Marie-Curie Research Fellows who are currently working in Pakistan. His research interests include embedded systems, information security at hardware & software levels, cryptanalysis, mixed criticality systems and parallel computing systems. Over the last 6 years, Dr. Bhatti has taught at the Information Technology University (Pakistan), the University of Nice-Sophia Antipolis (France) and COMSATS University Lahore (Pakistan). He has also been working with prestigious European research institutes like INRIA (Fr), Lab-STICC/UBS (Fr), KTH (Sw) and École Polytechnique de Paris (Fr). Dr. Bhatti has done his Postdoctoral research at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden. He holds a PhD in Computer Engineering and MS in Embedded Systems from the University of Nice-Sophia Antipolis, France. Dr Bhatti can be reached at: khurram.bhatti@itu.edu.pk.
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Although cybersecurity products are getting more and more sophisticated, however, still cyber security incidents are on the rise. This is and will remain an ongoing war between cyber attackers and cyber defenders. The effectiveness of cybersecurity controls not only depends on the sophistication of these controls but also it largely depends on the awareness and skill set of the cybersecurity operations team. The industry expects that the cybersecurity graduates should be capable enough to handle the seasoned cyber warriors out there and if there is some discrepancy in the skill set due to lack of experience then the graduates will gradually learn that during the real operations of the enterprises. It is like sending a fresh graduate from the academy directly to the front line of the war zone without passing them through the appropriate practice. The cyber range provides a real like virtual environment where cybersecurity professionals can learn, practice and test their cybersecurity skill. This practice prepares them to better cope with the cybersecurity incidents. Many organizations have developed large-scale virtualized cyber ranges. Normally, a cyber range is a complex setup that requires considerable infrastructure and processes in place which make cyber ranges an expensive product. There is a need to design and deploy scalable cyber ranges. Open source technologies can also help to reduce the cost of the cyber ranges. This talk will cover the design, setup, and services of the cyber range and will also cover the available open source technologies that can be used to build the cost-effective cyber ranges.
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Dr. Muhammad Yousaf is working as Associate Professor in the Faculty of Computing, Riphah International University, Islamabad, Pakistan. He is also serving as Head of Department, Department of Cybersecurity and Data Science at Riphah Institute of Systems Engineering (RISE), Riphah International University, Islamabad. He completed his Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from Center for Advanced Studies in Engineering (CASE), University of Engineering and Technology (UET), Taxila in 2013. He has a number of international research publications in IEEE, ACM, Springer, Elsevier conferences and journals. In Riphah, he is leading the Network Security Research Group, where he is supervising many national and international R&D projects in the area of cybersecurity. His research interests include network security, network forensics, traffic analysis, and IPv6.
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My talk will cover two major areas in Cybersecurity. On applied cyber security domain I will be presenting the overview of the activities at KPCERC, objectives and services offered and milestones. While in data protection I will discuss the importance of data protection regulations and its compliance. Talk will conclude with the importance of national Cybersecurity center to address the Cybersecurity and data protection issues. Talk will cover various e-governance standardization frameworks initiated by KPCERC. Importance of setting up organization CERTs and proposed implementation of provincial SOC will be discussed. In context of recent data breach incidents and violation of consumer privacy, I will also discussing the need and importance of data protection regulations and compliance. Issues with personal data management and Up-coming National Data Protection act and its comparison with data protection regulations practices across the world such as GDPR will also be shared. I will be addressing the issues & recommendations to be included in the national data protection regulation.
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I am serving as Chief Cyber Security at Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Cyber Emergency Response Center (KPCERC) which is unique initiative to complement the digital ecosystem by providing technological support & training in cyber security. KPCERC aims to capacity build government department by leveraging expertise and skills in domains of cyber security. KPCERC aspires to create cyber security awareness, assist & train government department employees & stakeholders and provide technology support, services & solutions. My role is designing and driving the execution of the cyber security related initiatives, complementing digital ecosystem and promoting e-governance solution in the KP. I have served as assistant professor in COMSATS University Islamabad and have been promoting innovation, product development and technology based startups. I had been mentoring technology based student ideas into products at CUI. Initiated first MS program in Cybersecurity at CUI and have been promoting Cybersecurity at various national and international forums. I completed his MS in Mobile & Radio communication and PhD in public safety communication systems from Lancaster University U.K. I have worked with Cyber Security Center at Lancaster University and & HW Communications. I had contributed in various ETSI, FP-7 and TSB-UK funded projects. At KPCERC I am involved in setting up provincial CERT; standardization of ICT based services, vulnerability assessment & Penetration Testing of digital assets of Government of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
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Visual contracts model the operation of components or services by pre- and post-conditions formalised as graph transformation rules. They provide a precise intuitive notation to support testing, understanding and analysis of software. Their detailed specification of internal data states and transformations, referred to as deep behavioural modelling, is an error-prone activity. In this talk I propose a dynamic approach to reverse engineering visual contracts from Java based on tracing the execution of Java operations. The resulting contracts give an accurate description of the observed object transformations, their effects and preconditions in terms of object structures, parameter and attribute values, and their generalised specification by universally quantified (multi) objects, patterns, and invariants. While this talk focusses on the fundamental technique rather than a particular application, I explore potential uses, including in program understanding, review of test reports and debugging.
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Reiko is best known for his work on graph and model transformation and their use in the modelling, testing and verification, reverse and reengineering of software systems and networks. He is one of the main contributors to the theory of graph transformation systems, their concurrency, modularity and refinement. He pioneered the development of timed and stochastic graph transformation systems for performance and network analysis. Reiko joined the University of Leicester in 2004, was appointed Professor in 2007 and Head of the Department of Computer Science in 2014. Reiko chairs the Steering Committee of the International Conference on Graph Transformation (ICGT), is president of the European Association for Software Science and Technology (EASST) and member of the steering committees of the conference on Fundamental Approaches to Software Engineering (FASE), the European Joint Conferences on Theory and Practice of Software (ETAPS) and the Software Technologies: Applications and Foundations (STAF). He is also a member of the IFIP WG 1.3 Foundations of System Specification.
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Vast amounts of data ranging from business data to operational data are readily available nowadays. By the advances of data collection technologies, data volume continues to grow, decision makers can gain deeper insight and farther foresight into their customers, employees, business processes, even the complexities of the markets and economy. However, the full potentials of big data have not been unleashed yet by most companies and users. Companies that have a good grasp of big data analytics will have an edge in harvesting business intelligence advantages which are essential in making the right decisions, boosting revenue and long-term growth. In this big data era, corporate executives opt for data-driven insights for strategic decisions support and invest into big data innovative applications. In this keynote speech, the latest big data analytics, on products, services and applications, would be introduced, analysed and discussed. This talk allows the participants to expose to the first-hand information about big data innovations, that come from the speakers’ industrial experiences from the government and agency’s big data projects. Participants will get to identify the underlying components of big data mining and big data analytics that are meant to support the innovative applications. Cases of big data mining and IoT would be elaborated along.
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Associate Professor Simon Fong graduated from La Trobe University, Australia, with a 1st Class Honours BEng. Computer Systems degree and a PhD. Computer Science degree in 1993 and 1998 respectively. Simon is now working as an Associate Professor at the Computer and Information Science Department of the University of Macau. He is a co-founder of the Data Analytics and Collaborative Computing Research Group in the Faculty of Science and Technology. Simon took up various managerial and technical posts, such as systems engineer, IT consultant and e-commerce director in Australia and Asia. He has published over 450 international conference and peer-reviewed journal papers, mostly in the areas of data mining, data stream mining, big data analytics, meta-heuristics optimization algorithms, and their applications. Simon serves as Vice-chair of IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (CIS) Task Force on “Business Intelligence & Knowledge Management”, and Vice-director of International Consortium for Optimization and Modelling in Science and Industry (iCOMSI).
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In this talk we will investigate machine learning assisted wireless communications based on various cost functions, including transmission content and transmission delay. More specifically, Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) such as drones can be employed as remote radio head (RRH) to provide better connection links to users near the cell-edge. Furthermore, each UAV can also be invoked for caching relevant media contents for users that it is serving, in order to minimize delay related to media request. Machine learning algorithms such as K-means clustering can be used for the user assignment to each UAV, while the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) algorithm can be used to predict future media request from the users. Practical wireless channel fading model and coding-modulation schemes are also considered to minimize transmission delay while maintaining reliable transmissions. We will show with a demo that the machine learning assisted UAV based wireless communication system is capable of minimizing the overall transmission delay while maintaining good transmission links.
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Dr Soon Xin Ng (Michael) received the B.Eng. degree (First class) in electronic engineering and the Ph.D. degree in telecommunications from the University of Southampton, Southampton, U.K., in 1999 and 2002, respectively. From 2003 to 2006, he was a postdoctoral research fellow working on collaborative European research projects known as SCOUT, NEWCOM and PHOENIX. Since August 2006, he has been a member of academic staff in the School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton. He was involved in the OPTIMIX and CONCERTO European projects as well as the IU-ATC and UC4G projects. He was the principal investigator of an EPSRC project on "Cooperative Classical and Quantum Communications Systems". He is currently an Associate Professor in telecommunications at the University of Southampton. His research interests include adaptive coded modulation, coded modulation, channel coding, space-time coding, joint source and channel coding, iterative detection, OFDM, MIMO, cooperative communications, distributed coding, quantum communications, quantum error correction codes, joint wireless-and-optical-fibre communications, game theory, artificial intelligence and machine learning. He has published over 240 papers and co-authored two John Wiley/IEEE Press books in this field. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE, a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy in the UK, a Chartered Engineer and a Fellow of IET.
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Our world is empowered by science and scientific knowledge as never before. Scientific and Technological advances are at a point where challenges to our education, health, governance, environment and wellbeing may be defined and potentially addressed in a way that could not have been imagined in a mere decade ago. Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) have transformed every aspect of our lives and offered unprecedented opportunities and challenges for education, health and government. Implementation architecture of change management and technology risk management best practices continues to be offered as strategic drivers towards improved efficient governance models, optimizing cost, better control and productivity of public sector. These approaches are predominantly drawn from private sector research and their application by the public sector remains a relatively under-researched area. In this talk, I will present three case studies of Pakistan’s government Organizations and a regional case study on cross functional team-based working. I analyse the success and failures in four organisational mechanisms that supported their implementation and identify the requirements for successful deployment. The said talk uncovers a critical requirement – the need not to break the status-quo but also manage and overcome resistance to change through the technology risk management in public sector
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Technology integration and Risk Management Consultant at Government of Pakistan, IDB (Islamic Development Bank) and Higher Education Commission Of Pakistan, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Worldwide Technologies & Consulting Pty Australia. Having 20+ years of experience as an IT Professional, primarily in the field of Technology Risk Management, Project management, Systems Integration, Business Intelligence, Applications Services Framework consultancy in Public sector, Oil & Gas, Public Health and telecom sector. Heading the Service Delivery group of a multi-disciplinary consulting practice that delivers solutions using a wide variety of IT Automation technologies and solutions, management and orchestration platforms of tier 3 datacentres and cloud solutions. Expert in project planning, execution and monitoring & control. Encompasses strong leadership, successful team-building capabilities combined with technical, and communication skills. Diverse technical expertise derived from rapid learning and effective application of cutting-edge technology. Facilitate problem-solving teams that accurately assess technical challenges and successfully transform ideas into appropriate, workable solutions. As a hard core portfolio and program manager, managed a number of international and national level projects of 1000+ Man Months at large platform of tier 3 on SaaS and PaaS mode. As a Principal Applications Framework Consultant primarily responsible for integration and design of Applications services Framework across large infrastructures. Writer, speaker, researcher and consultant in the fields of Technology Management & Middleware Risk Management and evaluation. Today, In addition to all I serves as an adviser, policy maker and Board Member to several National (Public sector) and International organizations.
