Umar Saif
Ph.D. University of Cambridge, 2001; Post-Doctorate MIT '03
Pervasive Computing, Operating Systems, Distributed Systems, Mobile Computing, Network Protocols and Architectures.
Email: umar [at] lums dot edu dot pk; umar [at] mit dot edu; umar dot saif [at] cantab dot net
Extension: 4421
Personal Web Page: http://web.lums.edu.pk/umar
Bio-Sketch
Umar Saif received his academic training from LUMS, Cambridge and MIT. He received his Ph.D. degree from University of Cambridge (2001) and Postdoctorate from MIT (2002), in Computer Science. Dr Saif worked and taught at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) for four years, where he was part of the core team which developed system technologies for project Oxygen- a US$40 million project sponsored by the US Department of Defense and an industrial Alliance of world-class companies. While at MIT, Dr Saif also managed the multi-million dollar collaboration on future computing technologies between University of Cambridge and MIT sponsored by the Cambridge-MIT Institute (CMI) and a consortium of high-tech companies.
Research Interests
Dr. Saif's research interests broadly span areas of Ubiquitous Computing, Operating Systems, Distributed Systems, Mobile Systems, Highspeed Routing Architectures and the impact of IT in developing world countries. Dr. Saif has authored several technical publications and is a Fellow of the Cambridge Commonwealth Trust. He was the first Pakistani to receive a PhD in Computer Science from University of Cambridge. During his doctorate studies, he was a Trinity College Overseas Scholar and Commonwealth Scholar at University of Cambridge. He has been nominated for the MIT Technovator award and the TR100 award. He has served on the technical advisory board of several technology companies and is a regular speaker at technology forums, especially relating to the impact of IT in developing-world countries
Research Group
Neighborhood for Emerging-world Technologies (NEWT): http://newt.lums.edu.pk
Dritte Forum: http://www.dritte.org
- Poor Man's Broadband: Peer-to-Peer Dialup Networking
Saif, U., Latif, A., Butt, S. F., and Butt, N. F., In ACM SIGCOMM CCR Journal, vol. 37, no. 5, October 2007. (ACM Press)
- Opportunistic File Association for Mobile Operating Systems
Saif, U., In Proceedings of the 7th IEEE Annual International Workshop on Mobile Computing and System Architectures, April 6-7, 2006.
- Medium Access Control Issues in Sensor Networks
Ali, M., Saif, U., Dunkels, A., Voigt, T., Römer, K., Langendoen, K., Polastre, J., and Zartash, U., In ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review (CCR), vol. 36, no. 2, pp. 33–36, April 2006.
- Reducing Configuration Overhead by Using Goal-oriented Programming
Paluska, J.M., Pham, H., Saif, U., Terman, C., Ward, S., In Proceedings of the 4th IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communication (PerCom), ISBN: 0-7695-2520-2, Pisa, Italy, March 13-17, 2006.
- Gigabit Routing on a Software-exposed Tiled- microprocessor
Saif, U., James, W., Anderson, Degangi, A., Agarwal, A., In Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE Annual International Symposium on Architectures for Networking and Communication Systems (ANCS), October 2005.
- Practical Experience with Adaptive Service Access
Saif, U., Paluska, JM., and Chauhan, V., In ACM Mobile Computing and Communication Review Journal (MC2R), vol. 9, ISSN 1559-1662. pp 27-40, January 2005.
- A Case for Goal-oriented Programming Semantics
Saif, U., Pham, H., Paluska, J.M., Waterman, J., Terman, C., and Ward, S., In System Support for Ubiquitous Computing (UbiSys), at the Fifth Annual Conference on Ubiquitous Computing, Ubicomp 2003.
- Service-oriented Network Sockets
Saif, U., and Paluska, J.M., In USENIX Annual Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services (MobiSys), 2003.
- Internet Access to A Home Area Network
Saif, U., Gordon, D., and Greaves, D.J., In IEEE Internet Computing, 54-63, January-February 2001.
- Communication Primitives for Ubiquitous Systems or RPC Considered Harmful
Saif, U., and Greaves, D.J., In Proceedings of ICDCS International Workshop on Smart Appliances and Wearable Computing, 2001.
| Computing Structures | Autumn 2007-08 |
| UROP - Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program | Summer 2006-07 |
| Advanced Topics in Computer Systems | Summer 2007-08,Spring 2006-07,Spring 2006-07 |
| Distributed Systems | Spring 2007-08,Winter 2006-07, Spring 2005-06 |
| Operating Systems | Winter 2007-08, Autumn 2006-07 |