LAHORE: Punjab University College of Information Technology (PUCIT) on Friday won a competitive research grant of Rs97.7 million to establish a research laboratory to address the multifaceted problem of traffic and transportation with the help of Information and Communication Technology.
Dr Waqar ul Qounain will be the Principal Investigator of the Lab while Dr Muhammad Murtaza, Dr Shahzad Sarwar and Mr Mian Mubasher would be the Co-Principal Investigators.
This group of PUCIT teachers applied for the grant to establish Agent-Based Computational Modeling Laboratory in National Center of Artificial Intelligence (NCAI).
NCAI will consist of six research laboratories, one each at National University of Science and Technology (NUST) PUCIT, University of Engineering and Technology (Lahore), COMSATS Institute of Information Technology (CIIT), NED (Karachi) and UET (Peshawar) with approximately Rs1.1 billion funding provided by the Planning Commission of Pakistan through Federal Higher Education Commission.
The PUCIT has prepared a roadmap to conduct state-of-the-art research and design intelligent software to solve traffic problems normally faced in the urban areas of the country. The college will also receive an additional grant through Rs280.85 million shared funds.
According to World Health Organization (WHO), about 1.25 million people die worldwide in road accidents every year. More than 90% of these accidents occur in developing (low and middle income) countries involving people having ages from 15 to 30.
If the trend continues then traffic accidents will be the 7th leading cause of death in the world by 2030. Keeping these projections under consideration, in the newly proposed initiative by the United Nations Organization (UNO) titled, “Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development”, a target is set to reduce these numbers to half by 2020.
According to Pakistan Bureau of Statistics (PBS), as many as 87414 road accidents occurred between 2004 and 2013, causing injuries to around 148230 persons, 31 percent of who died.
Growing population and immigration stress on urban cities transportation planning, management and up-gradation are becoming a big multifaceted problem affecting the lives of millions of people.
PUCIT will conduct studies to understand the behaviour of human drivers, design effective driver training and assessment tools and construct intelligent in-vehicle driver support system.
Besides driver’s intelligent support software, they have planned to build simulation software that will help transport engineers and policymakers to comprehend traffic dynamics, effects of various on-road interventions on traffic flow and interaction of pedestrians with road vehicles.
PUCIT Principal Dr Mansoor Sarwar said that this is perhaps the largest national competitive research grant won by any group of PU teachers. He said that last year the young PUCIT faculty had won three competitive research grants worth around Rs12 million through HEC’s National Research Program for Universities (NRPU), which formed the highest number of grants won among the 85 academic units in the whole of PU.
He further said that the college faculty has submitted 10 competitive research grants for funding through HEC and Punjab’s HEC, as well as six proposals for funding to establish research labs under the National Center for Data Analytics and Cloud Computing, National Center for Robotics and Automation, and National Center for Cyber Security.
Dr Sarwar said that future plans of the college are to remain a top-notch institution of higher learning in IT and computing through quality teaching and become a leading academic institution in the world through research, innovation, and commercialization.
Establishment of cutting-edge research labs, PUCIT Entrepreneurship Center, and on-campus Technology Park would be the focus of future academic ecosystem in the college, he concluded.
