Workshop on Furture Trends and Technology By Bebo White

ACM SEECS chapter has always aimed to get the students familiarize with the present as well as future technological vogues. Keeping that perspective in mind ACM SEECS Chapter invited Mr. Bebo White to SEECS for a workshop on “Future Trends in Technology” on 18-19 March at SEECS NUST H-12 Islamabad.

INTRODUCTION OF BEBO WHITE:

Bebo White is a Departmental Associate (Emeritus) at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, operated by Stanford University. Professor White is the author of eight books and over one hundred journal/proceedings articles. His current research interests are Web Science, Social Media in Education, and Cloud Computing.

WORKSHOP-DAY 1:

Mr. White came to SEECS on 18^th March 2015 and as he arrived the activities of the event were started. The arrival of the participants took place at 10 am in SEECS seminar Hall and soon after that there was a welcome address by the Principal of SEECS, Dr. Arshad Ali. After Dr. Arshad’s welcome note finally Mr. White took over the stage and began his workshop with the 1^st topic i.e. “Cloud and Mobile Computing”. Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) is the combination of cloud computing, mobile computing and wireless networks to bring rich computational resources to mobile users, network operators, as well as cloud computing providers. The ultimate goal of MCC is to enable execution of rich mobile applications

A short break was there after the 1^st session. The workshop resumed at 11:40 am and Mr. White continued with the topic of “Web Science and its impact on the future Web”. He explained the study of web and its impact on future technological vogues in detail. This was followed by the interactive session with the speaker in which the participants cleared their queries.  Soon after that there was lunch break for the guest and the participants and the session resumed at 2:30 pm. Mr. White continued amazing people with his next topic which was “Preparing for the Web of Things”. He explained that what should be our line of action if we want to cope with the changing world in terms of technology and expressed his views about changing of Web and measures needed to cope with it.

 This was the last topic of the workshop and after the lecture Mr. White allowed the participants to have a healthy discussion among them related to the topic. Besides this participants got to know each other as well and conversations went on for a while until Mr. White amazed every one with his selfie stick. He requested everyone to join him and the 1^st selfie with Mr. Bebo White was taken. Having a selfie stick clearly showed that Mr. Bebo White is such a jolly person full of enthusiasm.   

DAY 2 OF WORKSHOP:

Day 2 of the workshop began with the arrival of participants at 10 am. As the participants and the guest arrived the president of ACM SEECS Chapter Mr. Aadil Jalil Chaudhary gave a welcome address. After warm welcome the workshop began in full swing. Mr. White took over the stage and introduced the 1^st topic of Day 2 i.e. “Linked Open Data - A Step towards A Semantic Web”. In computing, linked data describes a method of publishing structured data so that it can be interlinked and become more useful through semantic queries. It builds upon standard Web technologies such as HTTP, but rather than using them to serve web pages for human readers, it extends them to share information in a way that can be read automatically by computers. This enables data from different sources to be connected and queried.

After the 1^st session a short break was taken and the session resumed at 11:40 am again. Now Mr. White introduced an interesting topic “Cyber-currency/Bitcoin” which attracted the attention of the speakers as this topic was related to the currency and money. Bitcoin is an online payment system invented by Satoshi Nakamoto, who published his invention in 2008, and released it as open-source software in 2009. The system is peer-to-peer; users can transact directly without needing an intermediary. Transactions are verified by network nodes and recorded in a public distributed ledger called the block chain.

 This was followed by the interactive session with the speaker and participants cleared the queries. After that on request of under graduate students Mr. White was invited to the SEECS lobby and fun/chit chat session took place and an interesting fact was revealed that Mr. White is a good singer and is a part of Jug Band who play music with a jug. Mr. White sang songs and delighted the audience with his awesome voice. Audience took a lot of pictures with him, asked questions and also sang folk songs depicting Pakistani culture to him (though he needed translation to understand those).

 He also told that his favorite Pakistani dish was chopped mutton and peas. After this fun session Bebo White took a lunch break and at 2:30 pm the workshop began again and the last topic of the workshop was “How Online Social Media Can Be Used to Build Rich Learning Environments”.

After this session there were closing remarks by the Pro-Rector. Mr. White distributed certificates among the participants and a shield was presented to Mr. White as a memoir. After that group pictures with Mr. Bebo White were taken and again the selfie stick was an object of focus for everyone. As the selfie stick was famous all over SEECS so at the end of day 2 Mr. White gifted that selfie stick to the ACM SEECS Chapter council as a gratitude for his warm welcome and enthusiasm of the participants.    

Report By 

Umer Ahmed Mehtab

(Vice Chair ACM SEECS Editorial Board)

Be Her Partner

ACM in collaboration with IEEE organized a talk “Be her Partner” by Ms.Tahira Malik, a human rights activist, lawyer, motivational speaker and a visiting faculty member at NUST. She highlighted equal partnership, family support and upbringing of a woman as the key factors for women empowerment. She started by the discussing the importance and credibility of women in the advancing community and highlighted the difficulties a working or studying woman has to face by the biased and prejudiced society.

 I carefully paid attention to the talk on ‘how the male dominant society defines self-made barriers in a woman’s life?’ How to make women empowerment possible when there is no equal treatment in areas like career, profession and being self-dependent. While the mentor addressed the audience, there was an aura of agreement and disagreement. A very good point was raised regarding sexism, just how a gender difference disapproves what you can achieve in life or let you feel safe when you go out for a good time.

 Mam specifically pointed out to stand up to the wrong assumptions set up by the so called right people. According to Ms.Tahira, it is truly a matter of choice what a person chooses to wear and as educated people we should never raise a question on a person’s character. The question answer series turned out rather surprising. All the male participants were the most energetic to ask questions which gave the hall a good laugh. However, Ms.Tahira managed to strike back with convincing answers.

Report By 

Hira Farooq

(Executive ACM Editorial Board)

Photograhers

Maham Shahid

Aatrah Rauf

Aayesha Arif

Logo Design Competition

The much awaited event of ACM-W was finally announced at November 5th 2014. It was a simple logo designing competition for ACM-W. This competition accepted entries of the designers via mail. The event closed on November 14th 2014, 11:55 pm. After the submissions, top three designs were selected by the judges and were put on the facebook page where the winner was selected on the basis of people voting through likes.

After a fabulous response and a lot of brain storming the winner was finally decided. The winner of this logo designing competition was chosen to be Talha Yousaf from BEE – 5 for his awesome design and was awarded a cash prize of pkr 1000.

CSed week

Computer Science Education Week (CSEd Week) is an annual affair dedicated to make computer science education common among the millions of students across the globe. It was initiated, as we all know, by Admiral Grace Murray Hopper (December 9, 1906) and is therefore celebrated each year from 8^th to 14^th December, worldwide.

Following events were organized by ACM SEECS Chapter this year in honor of the CSEd Week:

DAY 1:

HOUR OF CODE:

The Hour of Code is a global movement reaching tens of millions of students in 180+ countries. The motivation being that

“Every student in every school should have the opportunity to learn computer science”.

Anyone, anywhere can organize or host an Hour of Code but the grassroots campaign goal is for students to try an Hour of Code and what better time than the CSEd Week!

Keeping in view the significance of this event, ACM-SEECS Chapter organized the “Hour of Code”, and in line with our own aims and objectives we invited female students from a charity school and they were taught basics of coding by the President (ACM SEECS) himself. The purpose of the event, that is reaching out to the less privileged children and making modern technology and computer science education common to them, was achieved, and thus the event was successful.

The only problem was the lack of funds. The targeted student body (charity schools etc.) can’t afford to travel all the way to SEECS, NUST time and again, but neither are we in a position to provide them with conveyance. With this barrier removed we could make a significant difference in the schooling of these students.

DAY 2:

QUAD SOURCE SEMINAR:

A Quad Source Seminar was organized on the 2^nd day of CSEd Week at IAEC Lecture Hall in NUST. One of the alumni of NUST Nida came up with the introduction of a new technology “Augmented Reality” and its applications in Gaming, Advertising, and Amusements etc. The session was a source of realization for a lot of people who made up their mind to work on this technology in the near future.

Augmented reality is basically a technology that superimposes a computer-generated image on a user's view of the real world, thus providing a composite view. It has wide range of application and the session was arranged to get familiarized with these applications. A lot of videos and scopes were shown related to this technology and at the end question answer session was conducted.

Again the drive behind the organization of this seminar was to acquaint the students with the latest technologies and its uses so that they can use it in their research, projects and other fields.

LOGIC BUILDING SEMINAR:

On Tuesday, December 09 2014 The Association for Information Systems (AIS-SEECS Chapter) in collaboration with ACM-SEECS Chapter organized an another event for the CSEd Week at Farabi Lab SEECS; a logic building workshop for the students who are weak in logic building for programming.

The team of AIS under Mr. Abdul Hannan conducted this workshop and introduced techniques of logic building to the students. Their primary motto was that of Einstein’s’:

“Everything should be made as simple as possible.”

So the students were taught to make things simpler. They were introduced to the technique of “Divide and Conquer” so that problems could be broken down into smaller ones and tackled in a more efficient way. This workshop consisted of tutorials, lectures and at the end some activities by the students.

Towards the end some prizes were also given to people who completed the activities in time.

DAY 3:

CODE2SUCCESS:

In continuation of the Logic Building Workshop a coding session was also organized for the students, with small prizes for the best codes. This also aimed at inspiring the students’ interest in the field of computer science and related fields.

The session did not focus on a particular programming language but instead on how proficient a participant is at designing an algorithm for a particular problem and how fast, be it in any language. The designing of the algorithm is the essence of coding. Anyone can find the syntax of any programming language from the internet but until you know how to develop an algorithm you can’t be a successful coder.

Separate tasks picked out for the freshmen and the senior students, the level of difficulty depending on their skills and know-how of “Algorithm Designing”. The level of enthusiasm of the participants was almost tangible; it showed in their number and their efforts to design efficient algorithms.

DAY 4:

ANDROID CODEUP:

Google arranged this competition on December 11^th 2014, after a successful Android Development Workshop in November.

The overall objective of the event was to develop an interest of students in Android App Development. The competition was moderated by Rizwan Asif. The participants were given a small task: to develop a Temperature Converter from Celsius to Fahrenheit and vice versa. The submissions were judged on the basis of aesthetic sense and GUI.  

Students responded quite enthusiastically to this competition, as people from not only the Computers Department but also Electrical Engineering took part. More than 30 people registered and some showed up on the spot. Even a few freshmen took part.

The response from the participants was mostly positive. An SE Sophomore, says “This competition was quite helpful for me. I was finally able to test my skills that I developed after attending the Android Workshop.”

The event was planned by Google Student Ambassador Noor Zehra and other members of the NUST Google Community. The Android CodeUp Competition was held on 11^th December 2014, 1-2pm, in Farabi Lab, SEECS

LearnObots

ACM in collaboration with LearnObots organized workshops on different fields of applied electronics, robotics etc. The workshop in total consisted of five modules Lego Mindstorm, Snap circuits, Mobile Robots, 3D printing and Solar Power

ACM collaborated in Lego Mindstorm and Snap circuit.

Lego Mindstorm basically is series of kits contain software and hardware to create customizable, programmable robots. They include an intelligent brick computer that controls the system, a set of modular sensors and motors.

Snap Circuits basically is a line of electronic kits manufactured by Elenco Electronics and aimed at children eight years and older. The kits come in a variety of sizes, offering a range of building experience for the user, and may include motors, lamps and speakers

These workshops took place on 5^th – 6^th Dec and 12^th – 13^th Dec respectively. The objective of these workshops was to introduce science and engineering at very basic levels to children using toys. The participants were kids from fourth to eight grades. They showed interest and participated enthusiastically.

The workshops went well and they were appreciated