Software Engineering Lab (SEL)

SEL explores new horizons in the Software Engineering and its related areas. The motivation behind formation of SEL is to develop proficiency in Software Engineering research. The current research focus of its members is in the areas of e-government architectures, quality of conceptual models, maintenance metrics, architecture recovery of legacy systems, soft computing and autonomic computing.

SEL members have published over 10 research papers in international and local journals and conferences during the academic year 2005-06. Currently SEL is involved in research on Enterprise Architecture for E-Government, Usability and IT Adoption, Metrics for Conceptual Models, Role of Control Theory in Autonomic Systems, Automated Failure Recovery in Distributed Systems, Architecture Recovery of Legacy Systems, Injecting Autonomic Behavior in Legacy Systems, Measuring Quality in Self-Managed Systems, Spatial Complexity Metrics and e-Governance Architectures and Frameworks.

For more information regarding the activities at the Software Engineering Lab, please contact Dr. Shafay Shamail (sshamail AT lums DOT edu DOT pk).

Projects

An e-Government Framework in view of Pakistan's Tradition government structure

Investigator: Dr. Shafay Shamail
Project Duration: July 2007 - July 2008
Funded by LUMS ( Rs. 480000 )

An e-Government Framework in view of Pakistan's Tradition government structure

Investigator: Dr. Shafay Shamail
Project Duration: April 2006 - April 2007
Funded by LUMS ( Rs. 300000 )

Fuzzy Integral and AHP Based Study of Business Executives' Use of Information Technology in Smalland Medium Enterprises in Pakistan

Investigator: Dr. Shafay Shamail
Project Duration: February 2004 - July 2004
Funded by LUMS ( Rs. 90000 )
Electronic commerce has dramatically changed the manner in which inter-and intra organizational transactions are conducted. It is further argued that the advent of e-commerce has changed the trading and buying social culture. In order to effectively plan the e-commerce activity, factors affecting it need to be identified. In the proposal research Analytical Hierarchical Process (AHP) and Fuzzy Integral Methods are employed to determine the factors influencing adoption of e-commerce. The result obtained through the proposed methods will be compared with the standard statisical techniques.

Grants

A Low Cost Ultrasound Training Simulator

Principal Investigator: Naveed Arshad
Co-Investigators: Sohaib Khan (LUMS ) and Durr-e-Sabih (MINAR)
Project Duration: September 2007 - 2010
Funded by National ICT R&D Fund ( Rs. 15 million )

Ultrasound is a powerful diagnostic tool and is often the first modality used to image the patient. Its popularity with the medical community stems from its low cost, portability and noninvasiveness. It is now among the single most asked for procedure and there is a huge installed base of ultrasound units; in Pakistan alone it is estimated that there are around twenty thousand ultrasound units.

Ultrasound, despite its strengths is very operator dependent and has a long learning curve that involves not only the assimilation of facts but also mastering complex hand-eye coordination and acquiring motor skills that enable the user to acquire the relevant "section". Hundreds of cases need to be examined to achieve a level of competency.

The current training strategies include classroom teaching supplemented by hands-on sessions on normal subjects and patients. Hands-on sessions form the most important component of training but this is a situation that has several ethical and technical limitations. These problems can be overcome by developing a device that simulates various ultrasound scenarios in real-time or near real-time. An ultrasound simulator will provide hands-on training experience to medical students, obviating the need of having patients to practice on.

In this project we are going to develop an ultrasound simulator to augment ultrasound training and do away the necessity of hands-on sessions with patients.

For details regarding the project please visit http://uts.lums.edu.pk.

Reliable Failure Recovery in Self-managing Systems

Principal Investigator: Naveed Arshad
Project Duration: October 2007 - 2010
Funded by Higher Education Commission (HEC) ( Rs. 1.1 million )

With the increase in the number of computing devices dependable management of these devices is becoming an important research problem. To address this a new generation of systems commonly known as self-managing systems is coming into existence. Among other properties, an important property of self-managing systems is to detect and recover automatically from faults and failures with minimum human involvement. However, many existing failure recovery techniques are manual. Manual failure recovery takes a considerable time causing a significant business impact in terms of opportunity loss, administrative loss and loss of ongoing business. There is a need not just to reduce the downtime in the failure recovery process but also to automate it to a significant degree both to avoid errors that are caused by manual failure recovery techniques and to recover more rapidly. Furthermore, automated failure recovery requires reliability. Since the goal is to put minimum burden on the human the automated recovery process must be dependable.

The work in this project will explore new dimensions in the reliable failure recovery in self-managing systems. We will use intelligent techniques such as AI planning and optimization theory to develop novel failure recovery techniques. Moreover, to add dependability to the recovery process we will develop various automated mechanisms to test the dependability of a system.