Sign Language Research
Pakistan Sign Language (PSL) is under-investigated language as compared to many other sign language. For instance, there exist standard corpora for American Sign Language (ASL), British Sign Language (BSL), Chines Sign Language (CSL). Noticeable work is being done on Indian Sign Language (ISL) as well. The sign language research group aims to develop theories, data sets, tools, applications, and services for supporting the deaf community of Pakistan.
The group aims to develop:
a) Standard Corpus for PSL gestures
b) A machine translation system to translate from Natural Language to PSL
c) A machine translation system to translate from PSL to Natural Language
Security Profiling for Cities in Pakistan
This project aims to devise an architectural framework that will help extracting and storing data from different agencies including the news agencies to establish security profiles of cities in Pakistan. The data shall be acquired from several sources semi-automatically using a diverse data acquisition system. The gathered data is then processed so as to find the type of incidents happened, number of injuries, death toll, severity of the event etc. This information is further used by a visualization component to make useful reports, graphs, and other visual aids to analyse the collected data. The system also intends to find patterns in the incidents so as to predict future incidents so as to help the law-enforcement agencies.
Computer Science Education
This sub-group is working on improving the pedagogical practices through various means involving action research, programming language evaluation, project centric approach.
Project Centric Teaching and Learning
One important project undertaken by this group is to devise a project centric approach with the intent of strong involvement of students in the courses being taught through project centric approach. It also involves the alignment of course outline with project deliverables, consistent evaluation of deliverables throughout the execution of the courses, and continuous monitoring of the progress of student groups and individuals to figure out the required reinforcement in teaching.
Teaching Computer Programming Effectively
It is a global issue to increase the effectiveness for the course related to computer programming. Generally, these courses are offered in a series starting from an introductory course which is followed by a course involving Object Oriented Programming, and subsequently by Data Structures. Thereafter, advanced courses involving Visual Programming, Web Based Programming are also offered. This project aims to conduct basic research on the selection of appropriate programming language for the elementary courses. Furthermore, it also involves studies to refine the contents and align them with pedagogy and assessments for better execution of courses related to computer programming.