Context Aware Technologies For Assisstive Robotics @Lums

CATAR-2012, Workshop on Context Aware Technologies for Assistive Robotics (CATAR-2012), was held on December 07, 2012 at LUMS Syed Babar Ali School of Science & Engineering, LUMS, Lahore, Pakistan. It was organized by the newly founded Signal, Image and Video Processing Lab of the EE department of this school and was sponsored by DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service). The main theme of this workshop was the new and emerging area of Context-Aware Perception for Assistive Intelligent Robots. The Smart Lab of the SSE building provided a cozy place for holding presentations of this workshop while the Projects and Ideas session was held in the lobby of the ground floor. The combined strength of the registered participants in the morning and afternoon session was 120+. These were selected out of 200+ received applications.
In his opening speech, the Vice Chancellor of LUMS, Dr. Adil Najam, underlined the leading role of LUMS in spreading knowledge and technology in the Pakistani society and academia which was evident from the many workshops being held at LUMS. In his welcome speech Dr. Nadeem Ahmad Khan also showed the famous Charlie Chaplin video "Charlie Eating Machine" to set the context of the talks to follow.
The workshop program included three sessions of the invited talks. Researchers from TUM (Technical University of Munich, Germany), TUK (Technical University of Kaiserslautern, Germany), NED, UET and LUMS presented their interesting works. Topics of the talks included Natural Language Description of Videos, Text Recognition, Human Pose Recognition, Social Robot Interaction, Activity and Human Behavior Recognition. To start with Dr. Waqas Majeed reviewed the developments in the emerging area of Biomedical Applications of Context Aware Robotics. The researchers Sikandar Amin from TUM and Syed Atif Mehdi from TUK also used the opportunity to provide an overview of the ongoing research works in their respective groups along with presenting their works. Work under CAPAIR (Context-Aware Perception for Assistive Intelligent Robots) project at LUMS and NED in collaboration with TUM, Germany, was presented in the afternoon session. Dr. Humera Noor, Faculty NED, who is currently in Munich, joined the workshop on Skype.
The evening session was devoted to Projects and Ideas session which included live demos and poster presentations. The theme of this session/competition was also Context-Aware Signal, Audio and Video Technologies and Techniques that could contribute to socially friendly and intelligent Assistive Robotics. Students and faculty from various local universities like LUMS, NUCES, UMT, University of the Punjab and NUST contributed and competed in this session. LUMS-SSE Students were the dominant contributors to this session who made use of this opportunity to show case their work done in their course projects and senior projects. Robotics groups at LUMS and NUCES also displayed their exhibits and attracted a lot of attention. Dr. Anjum Ali (HOD, Electrical Engineering Department, NUCES, Lahore) and Dr. Shahid Masud (Chair EE Department LUMS) served as judges in this session.
In the closing ceremony the judges awarded shields to encourage the Best Projects and Ideas under three different categories: Best Projects, Best Short Projects and Best Ideas. Shields were also given to the invited speakers and honorable guests. Contribution certificates and workshop mugs were distributed to contributors of the Projects & Ideas Session. Others were given workshop participation certificates.
The participants of the workshop can be characterized as a good mix of faculty and students, academia and industry, and internal and external participants. The registered participants from industry included SUPARCO, Mobilink Telecom, CARE, NESCOM/NDC, Institute of Space Technology, PTCL, Texas Instruments, Vendevo and Archimedes Services. Participating students found the workshop worthwhile which provided them a good opportunity to get both encouragement and exposure.
The workshop organizers like to thank all guest, contributors and participants for the wonderful learning and motivating atmosphere that was created in the workshop because of their presence.
Dr. Nadeem Ahmad Khan (SSE-EE, LUMS)
Dr. Zahid Riaz (Fraunhofer IAIS, Germany)
Dr. Waqas Majeed (SSE-EE, LUMS)

Umt Students Won First prize OF Innovative Idea.
Adeel Tariq and Waqas Hamid
With senior project adviser
Sir Syed Farooq Ali — with Sir Farooq Ali and Rizwan Munawar Social Media Team Of UMT......!!!!!