Speakers

Title: Off-Road Robotics and its Applications

Bio: Prof. Dr. Karsten Berns studied computer science at the University of Kaiserslautern from 1982 to 1988. He specialized in artificial intelligence. His diploma thesis was the development of a diagnosis system for the classification of cancer cells. In 1994 he received his PhD. from the University of Karlsruhe. The topic of his Thesis was "Neural Networks for the Control of a six-legged Walking Machine". From 1989 till April 2003 he was employed at the Research Center of Information Technologies (FZI) at the University of Karlsruhe where he led the group "Interactive Diagnosis- and Servicesystems" (IDS). During this time his research work was focused on the development of technical diagnosis systems as well as the realization of adaptive control concepts for service robots. Since April 2003 he is a full professor for robotic systems at Kaiserslautern University of Technology. Present research activities are in the area of autonomous mobile robots and humanoid robots with a strong focus on control system architecture and behavior-based control.

Web: agrosy.informatik.uni-kl.de

Title: Socio-Technical Mobile Services and Process Management in Agriculture

Bio:  Professor Andreas Dengel is a member of the Management Board as well as Scientific Director at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI GmbH) in Kaiserslautern where he is leading the Knowledge Management research department. In 1993 he was appointed Professor at the Computer Science Department of the University of Kaiserslautern where he held the chair “Knowledge-Based Systems”. Since 2009 he is also Professor (Kyakuin) at the Department of Computer Science and Intelligent Systems, Graduate School of Engineering, at Osaka Prefecture University. Andreas is an advisory board member of the Intl. Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR), the CVC at the University of Barcelona, Spain, the NEC Computers and Communication Innovation Research Labs (CCIL), in Nara, Japan, and the Center of Excellence on Semantic Technologies at MIMOS, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Formerly, he was the German representative in the ICT Prize Executive Jury of the European Council of Applied Science (Euro-CASE), a lecturer of the Joint Executive MBA course at the Johannes Gutenberg University at Mainz, the University of Texas at Austin, and the Dongbei University of Finance and Economics at Dalian, China. From 1997 to 2001 Andreas was a member of the METTREC Planning Committee (Metadata/Text/Retrieval Conference Committee) of the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) in the United States. Besides many keynotes at international conferences, Andreas gave numerous invited technical talks at highly renowned universities and research labs including MIT, Stanford University, PARC, UC Berkeley, UC Davis, CMU, ATR, Microsoft Research und Google Research. He was program/technical chair of DAS, ICPR, ICDAR, KES, KM und KI. Andreas is a Member of the Editorial Board for international journals like IJDAR, Intelligent Decision Technologies or Future Internet. Moreover, he is founder or initiator of several successful start-up companies, e.g. Insiders Technologies where he also acted as a CEO between 1999 and 2001. In 2005 he received a “Pioneer Spirit Award” for one of his start-up concepts. He has written or edited 10 books and is author of more than 180 peer-reviewed scientific publications. He has supervised more than 170 PhD and master theses.

Web: http://www3.dfki.uni-kl.de/agd/dengel/content/index_eng.html

Title: Robotic Applications for Monitoring Critical Infrastructures and Environmental Sensing

Bio: Dr. Abubakr Muhammad does fundamental research at the interface of systems engineering, applied mathematics and applied physics, on various problems in robotics, distributed sensing, network dynamics and quantum information sciences. His interests span the study of connections and complexity in large-scale distributed networks; topological methods for information discovery in massive data sets; and communication, computation & control issues in the physics of information. He has also worked and consulted for the industry on the design of air traffic control systems, radar & sonar systems, communication equipments and medical instrumentation. His current research focuses on the development of cyber-physical systems for development and critical infrastructures in Pakistan, in particular issues related to water.

Dr. Abubakr received his PhD in Electrical Engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology (2005). As a graduate student, he also got a masters degree in Mathematics (2005) and a masters degree in Electrical Engineering (2002) from Georgia Tech. He completed his BSc in Electrical Engineering from the University of Engineering and Technology Lahore, Pakistan (2000). Before joining LUMS, he has taught and done research as a postdoctoral fellow at McGill University, Canada (2007-2008) and at the University of Pennsylvania, USA (2006-2007).

Web: cyphynets.lums.edu.pk/index.php

Title: 3D Reconstruction in Man-made Environments from a Single Image

Bio: Dr. Khan earned his PhD degree in Computer Science in 2002 from University of Central Florida, Orlando, specializing in computer vision. He received BE degree in Electronics Engineering from GIK Institute of Engineering Sciences and Technology, Pakistan, in 1997. He was the recipient of two graduate merit fellowships from University of Central Florida and the Hillman Award for excellence in PhD research. Currently, he is holding the position of Associate Professor at Lahore University of Management Sciences, Pakistan. He is an Associate Editor of Machine Vision and Applications journal, and served on the committees of IEEE Workshop on Motion and Video Computing (2002 and 2007), British Machine Vision Conference (2007) and Workshop on Frontiers of Information Technology (2005-2007). He has served as an image-processing consultant for public and private sector organizations in Pakistan, and his lab at LUMS has received significant funding for research on computer vision problems.

Web: cvlab.lums.edu.pk

Title: Reading Text in Scene Images

Bio: Dr. Faisal Shafait is a Senior Researcher at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) in Kaiserslautern, Germany. His research interests include machine learning and pattern recognition with a special emphasis on applications in document image analysis. He has co-authored over 80 publications in international peer-reviewed conferences and journals in this area. He is an Editorial Board member of the International Journal on Document Analysis and Recognition (IJDAR), a Program Committee member of the 5th International Workshop on Computational Forensics, to be held in Tsukba, Japan and was a PC Chair of the 4th International Workshop on Camera-Based Document Analysis and Recognition, held in Beijing, China in September 2011.

Web: www.dfki.uni-kl.de/~shafait/

Title: Inside-Out Vision for understanding Human Activities

Bio: Dr. Humera Noor Minhas did her Postdoc in 2011 at the Intelligent Autonomous Systems group at Technische Universität München (TUM). Her interests include, but are not limited to, Robotic and Computer Vision, Scene Perception, Understanding Everyday Human Activities and Inside-Out Vision. She did her PhD in 2008 with majors in Computer Vision and Image Processing (Object Synthesis, Recognition and Classification) from NED University of Engineering and Technology (NEDUET), Karachi, Pakistan in collaboration with the Computer Vision Lab at University of Central Florida, USA. A Computer Systems Engineer at her core, Dr. Humera Noor Minhas brings in a teaching experience of over 11 years, and is currently an Associate Prof. and Co-chairperson at the Telecommunications (Electronic)  Engg. dept. at NEDUET. She secured DAAD funding under their program on "German-Pakistani Research Collaboration" and is currently the project coordinator for the project on "Context-Aware Perception for Assistive Intelligent Robots". This project is a joint venture among TUM (Munich), NEDUET (Karachi) and LUMS (Lahore). 

Web:

Title: Assistive Vision: Human Robot Interaction for Everyday Activities

Bio:  Dr. Nadeem Khan received his Ph.D. from the Eindhoven University of Technology. Dr Khan Joined LUMS in May 2002. Earlier, he worked at Streaming Networks (Pvt) Ltd, Islamabad where he performed several projects related to image processing and video compression in the context of multimedia products. His Ph.D. research work was on minimal training dependent and robust text recognition systems. This research work and rest of his graduate study have been in close association with Philips especially with its facilities of Philips Research Lab (LEP), France, Centre for Manufacturing Technology, The Netherlands and Philips International Institute, The Netherlands. In between his degrees he had worked both locally and abroad including teaching at University of Engineering and Technology, Lahore and working as a Hardware Design Engineer at Philips Industrial Automation Systems, Eindhoven, The Netherlands. He has several international conference and journal publications to his credit in his area of interest. He is also leading the Multimedia Research Lab and supervising both internally and externally funded research projects. He has also earned the HEC Outstanding Research Award.

Web: