But maybe Anas Bin Abdullah is different. I met him during my 40-dayer and spent 5 days with him in Lahore. I’ve met tons of converted Muslims in the last 6 years from all parts of worlds but his story was pretty interesting. As he actually belonged to a 1) rich and 2) devoted Christian family. He told me his father had his own two churches in Kal City and he himself occasionally used to preach in them too. He was married to three wives and apparently had a dozen of children (well he said that’s pretty normal in Malaysia, especially for the rich guys ).

At the age of 27 a level of discontent was growing in him. ‘I just couldn’t seem to relate myself to any of ideologies I preached for years or for that matter the churches which we owned ourselves’. So after a few years of living as an Atheist and trying out Hinduism and Buddhism as well, he says one day I decided to convert to Islam.

Well this sound a bit magical and pretty hard even for me to digest but he mentions that all of a sudden I started to enjoy myself. But the backlash was very strong. He said his whole family went against him and started to torture him physically & mentally. He body was full of knife scars as his father used to tie him up and threatened him to leave Islam.

His wives left him and now he told me he lives alone in an apartment and studies in one of the madrassas. He came to Pakistan to spend 4 months and will be off back to Kal soon.

The striking thing is that how this all links up with the sacrifices of Sahaba (RA). We always used to hear their stories how they used to convert to Islam and then were ready to suffer any torture from the very first day. They sacrificed their money, their families, their status everything from day 1. And now we see similar stories in today’s world.

It’s all getting pretty interesting now.

It’s a short blogging break. No need to panic

Stay calm, stay happy.

Bye !

It seems like yesterday I got engaged. Time passes so quickly. And it was surely a wonderful year with some pretty memorable moments shared with my fiance. May the future be equally sweet.

With both of our families spread around the globe, it was a horrendous task to find out the date which was one-size-fits-all. The crappy thing is that LUMS work in quarter system so basically I get off when nobody is off and vice versa. Like in Dec, when the whole world gets holidays we are stuck up with our quarter starting. I mean my studies was apparently the last thing in our mind as Jan would be right the middle of my quarter, so you can understand the scale of issues. With my sister stuck in her getting her travelling papers which has surely been a drag for so long, bhai stuck in his job, bhabee had her semester starting, waleed having his crucial admission tests and that’s just our part of the story, considering more than half of my in-laws are dispersed in between UAE and USA and naturally we had to accomodate them too :-P.

Anyways, all of you my peeps out there reading this blog, my wedding cards are not yet out now but the invitation is here. So all you crappy freaks you have a friggin 4 month time span to escape from your otherwise dreadful lives and plan ahead. I ain’t going to listen to any excuses like I didn’t have money to come to Pakistan (Shabby) or I was busy with my own wife (idreez) or I was having my own wedding (Yaser) or I was busy coding (Sharjeel) or I had to watch 343423 season of 3323th show (Omar) or I had my boring job to die for (Momin) or I was busy with my daughter (Salman) or I had to fulfill my monthly chuss quota (Adil) or I had my quarter+job very hectic (Adil#2) or my knees were hurting (Burhan) or I had to apply for my MBA (Umair) or I had to finish my MBA (Abdullah) or I was busy with my dates (Shahrukh) or I had to do CFA/MBA/ACF/ABC/DEF all at once (Jehanzeb).

All you guys have to do is to hop on the truck and reach the sacred land of Peshawar on the sacred dates…

..though in a slightly more safer manner

————

Good news for our PhD program
Sohaib Khan
Sent: Monday, September 08, 2008 10:28 AM
To:
All SSE Faculty
Cc:
Asad Abidi; MS
Dear Colleagues

I have extremely good news to share. Our paper titled “Nonrigid Structure from Motion in Trajectory Space” has been accepted for full oral presentation at NIPS 2008. The paper has also been nominated to be a contender for the best student paper award.

NIPS (Neural Information Processing Systems) is one of the highest-rated and most-competitive conferences in broad area of machine learning, and is ranked A+ in the CORE list. Of the 1022 papers submitted this year, 250 were accepted but only the top 28 papers were selected for oral presentation at the conference; ours is one of those 28 papers.

This bodes extremely well for our PhD program, for Ijaz Akhtar, the first author of the paper, is a PhD student in the Department. He has worked extremely hard over the past two years on this research. He is being jointly advised by myself and Dr Yaser Sheikh at CMU. Dr Takeo Kanade, chair of Robotics Institute at CMU, is also a co-author on this paper and gave us very useful advice on this work through our video conference sessions.

In this paper we formulated a new way of solving the nonrigid structure from motion problem, by proposing that the 3D structure should be represented as a linear combination of temporal bases. Our technique has shown much better results on highly complex sequences than what was possible before. We received consistently high reviews from all four reviewers: On a scale of 10, our scores were 9, 8, 8 and 7. One of the reviewers, in his summary, wrote: “This could be an important paper in the field. It is a clever idea, well executed, with convincing results. Has potential for impact in numerous application areas.” Another reviewer simply called it “a solid paper”.

Regards,
Sohaib

Congratulations to Dr.Sohaib and Ijaz. It surely is an achievement for our CS department and as a whole for LUMS.

Though I’d like to mention the gulf of exposure we had here between FAST and LUMS. Even though Ijaz is a Phd student but in FAST we were never groomed to do research and aim for conferences. The faculty (bar Dr.Sarmad ) either was too busy dealing with all the politics (half ignited by themselves and half by the students) or never had interest in doing some internationally acclaimed research. Infact the best a student could think to do apart from studies was to win Softec. Students after graduation dreamed to go to Microsoft etc. rather than pursuing a Phd in top notch university. And all that when there is not an inch of doubt that technically and skill-wise Fastians were/are way ahead of Luminites.

I remember Sharjeel/Shakeel asked me to join up for our final year project where they aimed to write a research paper and for once I was like what friggin good is that for?

But the best thing is the marketing antic of releasing the comic book of how Chrome works. It is absolute classic way to explain the sheer technical details of the browser. It’s so exciting and entertaining that I couldn’t stop reading it until the end. And considering that we have been working on a presentation of our Grad thesis for the last few days, focusing on how we can explain our stuff to laymen and keep their concentration during the gory technicalities of the project, this comic book surely leverages some new pathways. I’ll recommend all you guys out there even if they are not from the computer background to go through it.

Presentation of your stuff is a very important part of the whole innovation you are doing. You might be the best technical guy out there but if you can’t make people go wow then you are surely loosing it. And presentation has a llooooott more to do than just talking and waving your hands. As much as usually people admire me on my communication skills but I still beleive there is hell lot more left to do. And surely these publicity stunts by the big companies like Jobs speeches and this very comic book opens up a lot of new dimensions of how instilling an awe-struck feeling into your audience about your project/product.

credit: one of my favourite bloggers: Dare Obasanjo

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