The Core Communications and Networks Laboratory (CoNNekT Lab) at School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (SEECS), National University of Science and Technology (NUST), is a newly established research lab under the guidance of Dr. Saad Qaisar, a Michigan State University alum. The lab currently focuses on a diverse set of areas ranging from efficient multimedia coding and communication for telecom networks to e-health monitoring solutions and medical devices. The lab’s focus is on both applied and theoretical research. For theoretical research, the emphasis is on multimedia communications over packet networks; compressed sensing; video coding and communications over the Internet and wireless networks; modeling and analysis of the stochastic behavior of communication networks, applied information theory and network optimization. For applied research, lab’s particular focus is to improve the quality of life for low-income households in developing world through the creation and implementation of low cost technologies.

The lab’s applied research approaches also aim at envisioning the impact of emerging technologies at problems that have relevance to both developed as well as developing world. There is a strong emphasis in the lab to look for ideas that have relevance in above context and convert them into finished products that can compete in both local and international markets. Ideally situated at NUST-SEECS with access to fine human resource and research infrastructure available in Pakistan and a knowledge of both developed industrialized world as well as developing world, it provides an ideal candidate for joint ventures between Pakistani academia and expatriates. The research activities of the lab are being funded by a start-up grant from NUST. Below, we have provided a summary of few activities @ CoNNekT Lab in health-care domain though lab has a wider application domain.

Wearable Health Monitoring System

Health-care has become a key constituent of the architecture of contemporary societies, however, all over the world health-care systems are clearly not performing as well as they could and as they should. People are increasingly impatient with the inability of health services to deliver levels of national coverage that meet stated demands and changing needs, and with their failure to provide services in ways that correspond to their expectations. Few would disagree that health systems need to respond better – and faster – to the challenges of a changing world. There is a growing shortage of health-care facilities worldwide, whereas the number of people requiring access to a hospital is increasing. In Pakistan there are only 8 physicians, 5 nurses and 10 hospital beds for every 10,000 in Pakistan. The result is that patients are receiving lesser than recommended care. This requires an approach that would “put people at the center of health care” by using technology as an enabler for providing effective care.

Researchers at CoNNekT Lab in collaboration with Telemedicine and e-Health Training Center, Holy Family Hospital Rawalpindi are addressing health-care issues by developing a context-aware, ubiquitous system that monitors health conditions of patients in a patch form factor. The system  would be as easy to use as applying a band-aid. It would collect real-time information regarding the medical condition of patients in an unobtrusive manner both inside and outside the hospital. This collected information is pre-processed locally and then transmitted to a central station. In this way, health-care professionals have continuous access to their patient’s physiological state which allows them to respond in a better way to changing conditions. The work focuses both on device designs as well as associated signal acquisition, processing and inference. Currently, the work is being funded by NUST start-up grant and a full-fledged system level design is under review with National ICT R&D Fund.

Wireless Neonatal Care

At the Millennium Summit 2000, through the unanimous adoption of the United Nations Millennium Declaration, all 192 United Nations member states recognized the importance of reducing child mortality. The target set for achieving this goal was to reduce by two thirds, the under-five child mortality rate between 1990 and 2015. However, in 2008 it was reported that despite progress, deaths of children under five remain unacceptably high. Furthermore, a child born in a developing country is over 13 times more likely to die within the first five years of life than a child born in an industrialized country and thirty-seven per cent (37%) of under-five deaths occur in the first month of life. Currently Pakistan ranks as the 28th country with a staggering 67.36 deaths of infants under one year per 1,000 live births.

Neonatal care is a specialty area of pediatrics that deals with the care of newborn babies, especially those in critical situations. Most babies in neonatal care are born premature or before their due date. Many babies born a month or more early won’t have fully developed lungs, and if a newborn baby is less than five pounds at birth, he/she will probably have to stay in neonatal care until sufficient weight gain is achieved. Researchers at CoNNekT Lab are developing an unobtrusive system that would allow continuous monitoring of the neonate without the need for connecting wires. This system would record vital parameters of the neonate and transmit that information wirelessly to a central server. The use of ubiquitous health monitoring systems can improve neonatal care and save countless newborns by overcoming the shortcomings of Pakistan’s health-care infrastructure. The project is currently in prototype stage and under review with Higher Education Commission, Pakistan for complete funding.

Airway Inflammation monitoring

One of the leading chronic diseases affecting more than half a billion people worldwide is asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. The need to monitor airway inflammation in asthma, has led to the development of a number of noninvasive methods of assessment, including analysis of cells and cell products in sputum samples collected by means of induced sputum stimulation, as well as the measurement of exhaled markers and soluble mediators obtained from exhaled breath condensates. Recently, exhaled air temperature has also been suggested as a noninvasive method for the evaluation of airway inflammation in asthma. Doctors are particularly interested in exhaled air temperature in hot climates. Currently available devices are expensive on one hand and at the other hand the design does not cater for the hot climate of Pakistan.

Researchers at CoNNekT lab are working on designing an economical device that can scale to masses, accurately provides markers for asthma monitoring and is suitable for use in the warm climate of Pakistan.

Hierarchical Clustering for Wireless Sensor Networks

The energy constrained nature of wireless sensor nodes, large multi-hop Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) must be organized in a way that enables scalable routing, data aggregation, and querying. In order to minimize the effort involved in the deployment and maintenance of a large WSN, it is highly desirable that the organization should be maintainable with minimal human intervention. The communication cost between nodes is much higher as compared to computation cost. One-to-one communication between all the nodes depletes their energy quickly which otherwise can be utilized for useful computations. A complex network of sensor nodes can be simplified using clusters.

Researchers at CoNNekT lab are developing energy efficient cluster selection mechanisms which would help increase the lifetime of sensor nodes and aid in development of a multi-tier sensor network architecture. (See here for publications)

Distributed Video Coding for Wireless Sensor Networks

Distributed video coding, a well established paradigm, refers to separate encoding at the sensor nodes and joint decoding at the base-station. It is suitable for visual sensor networks due to lower power consumption of encoding algorithm. The challenges include limited power and processing capabilities of sensor platform.

Researchers at CoNNekT lab aim is to develop a practical framework of robust and energy efficient multimedia (image/video) transmission over wireless visual sensor networks.

Safety Assurance in High Stress Environments

Pakistan is a country blessed with very rich underground mineral resources. New areas are continuously being explored with possible mineral deposits. According to some sources, country’s more than 6,00,000 sq.kms of outcrops area demonstrates varied geological potential for metallic/non-metallic mineral deposit. In the recent past, exploration by government agencies as well as by multinational mining companies presents ample evidence of the occurrences of sizable minerals deposits. Recent discoveries of a thick oxidized zone underlain by sulfide zones in the shield area of the Punjab province, covered by thick alluvial cover have opened new vistas for metallic minerals exploration. Furthermore, the discovery of coal deposits having over 175 billion tons of reserves at Thar in the Sindh province has given an impetus to develop it as an alternate source of energy.

Researchers at CoNNekT lab are developing a safety assurance system for high stress environments such as underground mines and oil & gas installations. The developed system would be used for monitoring the presence and/or concentration of toxic gases of harsh environments, monitoring structural integrity, detecting the collapse in case of accidents and localizing the collapses as well. The project is a joint venture between CoNNekT lab, NUST (Principal Investigator) and Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS). The funding for the project is under review with National ICT R&D Fund.

For further information on CoNNekT Lab, you may like to contact: connektlab at seecs.edu.pk or lab director directly: saad.qaisar at seecs.edu.pk

Tweet This Post

I had the good fortune of meeting three amazing Pakistanis who are in the process of changing the Pakistani society. They are young in years but mature and savvy in technology, business and the art of managing dynamic organizations. They share traits that are common to global entrepreneurs of self drive, respect for time, global market awareness,  getting quickly to the bottom of things and balancing priorities. All three of them got their education and training outside Pakistan and are now inculcating and mentoring Pakistanis with what they learned abroad.  As it turns out they are spearheading in the three synergistic technological areas of education, research and industry. Sometimes the stars get aligned and the right opportunities are given to people with the right credentials and motivations.

Dr. Qasim Sheikh

Dr. Sheikh is the CEO of ICT R&D fund that was created to fund research from the profits of the telecom sector in Pakistan. This is one of the great things that has happened for research in Pakistan.  It is unusual to find an academic with a strategic sense of research to maximize social impact.  His background of having worked in industry, research and academia is serving him well in his current role.  His vision is “to transform Pakistan’s economy into a knowledge based economy by promoting efficient, sustainable and effective ICT initiatives through synergistic development of industrial and academic resources”. Some of the notable ICT funded projects are

• Development of Open Source Human Machine Interface called OpenControl.

• Design and Implementation of Health Level 7 (HL7) Open Source Application for e-health Services

The aim of this project is to carry out research in healthcare by developing Health Level 7-based software framework in order to provide health services for diverse communities of the world. The envisaged development of HL7 middleware software will be focused on healthcare information systems already in use. The objective is to facilitate e-health services interoperable among various domains in the field such as laboratory, patient administration, pharmacy, billing and accounting etc.

• An Artificial Immune System Based General Purpose Intrusion Detection System

• Conversion of NGOSS Compliant, Web 2.0 Enabled Mediator, Rater and Biller Applications

Open source Billing and Customer Support software is a suite of applications that will fulfill all basic requirements of back office Billing and Customer Care of any Wireless or Wireline Service Providers.

• Massively Parallel Fingerprint Recognition System Architecture for Performing Multi Million Matches per Second

This project will develop a high speed FPGA-based scalable Fingerprint Recognition System Architecture. The architecture will be scalable for higher throughput applications. The project aims to develop algorithms, which can be efficiently mapped in Hardware for subsequent mapping on FPGA-based system. The project proposes to develop this massively parallel fingerprint recognition system architecture for performing multimillion matches per second for high-density applications.

He is in the process of establishing Centers of Innovations across Pakistan in

• Developing Next Generation Service and Network Management Systems
• SME Productivity Improvement
• eHealth
• Agriculture Sector
  
• Education Sector
  
• Energy Sector
• Security Sector

Dr. Arshad Ali

Dr. Ali is the Director General of School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (SEECS) and the National University of Science and Technology (NUST) in Islamabad Pakistan. He blends the diverse traits of an academic, administrator and an entrepreneur. When he showed me around the SEECS building, I was struck by the fact that he has established numerous relationships with industries in leveraging his educational facilities. This practical education is going to prepare NUST students to hit the ground running as they enter the work force. It also inculcates a culture of entrepreneurism which is so much needed in Pakistan.

He has over 90 publications to his credit in national and international conferences & refereed journals. He has been awarded gold medal by Pakistan Academy of Sciences and COMSTECH for IT research, Presidents’ Gold medal for best researcher of the year 2005 and “Distinguished Scientists of the Year 2006” award by Pakistan Academy of Sciences. Dr Arshad initiated research collaboration with Center for European Nuclear Research (CERN), Switzerland and earned the Associate Institute status of CMS-CERN for National University of Sciences & Technology (NUST). Dr Arshad formed a joint consortium with University of the West of England UK, Beijing Institute of Technology China , University of South Britteny France and NUST Pakistan.

You can see his interview with “In the Line of Wire” here.

Mr. Monis Rahman

It is difficult to do justice to Mr. Rahman in one blog. He has done more in his short lifetime than most of us can do in our entire life. He went from being a hard core chip designer working on the Itanium CPU for Intel into building world class portals on the web. Being a hardware engineer I can only marvel at the plasticity of his brain. What I found intriguing in listening to him was his drive and business sense that most of the engineers tend to lack. One of the lessons is that you don’t have to get an MBA degree to learn how to start and grow a company. His decision to go back to Pakistan when he was at the peak of his carrier in the US and change his skill set to make that happen, is a true sign of an entrepreneur willing to do whatever is necessary to achieve a goal. He is the CEO of Naseeb Network ” A Muslim Social Network”  and Rozee, the number one jobs portal in Pakistan. Even OPEN has collaborated with Rozee to create a jobs portal for the Pakistan Americans in the US at http://open.rozee.pk .

You can learn more about how he started his internet companies and where he is headed in the video below.

He likes to think big. His next endeavors are going to blend the web portals with cell phones and mobile devices to bring real time location centric services to the web.

These three gentlemen represent a new breed of entrepreneurs that will create the high margin intellectual property based industries that will be globally competitive. They are in the process of changing the social landscape of Pakistan by empowering everyone with the possibilities of acquiring advanced skills and deploying them efficiently.  They are Pakistan’s only hope in developing high value jobs and generate foreign exchange that will make her truly sovereign.

Tweet This Post

January 5^th., 2010

National University of Science and Technology is a combination of many colleges that were setup to take care of defense needs, as well as some others. Its main sprawling campus occupies a complete Islamabad sector of H-12. I had the opportunity to visit the campus in my recent visit to Pakistan and had the privilege of speaking at a seminar titled “Commercialization of Ideas”. There is a growing sensitivity at NUST to translate research being done there into the commercial domain. The three main speakers covered the subject from different perspectives.

From Mind to Market – Ms. Madeeha Owais
Business Acceleration Program – Mr. Azhar Rizvi
OPEN Platform Opportunities – Mr. Imran Khan

Dr. Arshad Ali (Director SEECS) opened the session by describing the research achievements by the NUST faculty and students. He also talked about the patenting activities undertaken by NUST. Ms. Owais focused on the different aspects of IP licensing. Mr. Rizvi talked about the success stories resulting from the three years of BAP activities and the establishment of angel network. The result of mentoring of BAP winners by MIT Enterprise Forum and OPEN has resulted in spectacular increases in sales as well as valuations. My talk focused on describing OPEN’s history, goals, structure and activities. I also shared my observations about Pakistani technology landscape based on running an operation in Pakistan for five years, and offered suggestions about how to effectively channel research and IP development. Secretary of IT, Mr. Nagibullah Malik, spoke about the government’s efforts to make IT as successful as the telecom sector. The seminar was attended by NUST faculty, students and business members who interacted with the speakers in the Q&A panel.

There are over a dozen research groups in the SEECS department alone. I was impressed by the works of Dr. Syed Ali Khayam in Network Security, Dr. Hafiz Farooq Ahmad in Semantics applied to Health solutions and Dr. Rehan Hafiz in Image Processing.

Dr. Qasim Sheikh educated me about the availability of considerable research money available through ICT R&D fund. This money is contributed through the profit of telecom operators and is available for any research area.

I had graduated from College of Aeronautical Engineering which is now part of NUST. The graduating class size of G courses was just twenty or so then. Despite this I was pleasantly surprised to see its graduates leading both in industry and academia. CAE was funded by US tax payer and modeled after US AFIT. If such a small college can make such an impact, NUST is destined to make a major impact on the technical future of Pakistan.

more photos at http://www.softserv-intl.com/NUST2010/

Tweet This Post

by Imran H. Khan

Take a good look of the photo of Attock Fort as I am going revisit it towards the end. The use of term science and technology subconsciously suggests that science comes first and technology is a product of science. There is a growing sense in the West that this linear thinking is disconnected with reality. The new thinking states that most of the science could not have been made possible without the availability of technology. While this discussion is best left to people are a lot more cerebral, I would like to focus on the question of relative importance given to technology and science in the developing world in general, and Pakistan in particular. Countries like Pakistan have to make smart choices in terms of allocation of limited human resources and money. My experience in Pakistan leads me to believe that there is a simplistic view of technology and science. Now I know that every time I write “technology and science”, something in your brain says that this author is again miss-typing science and technology.  This is the mental programming which subconsciously makes us think of the science’s supremacy over technology.  So we have titles like “Minister of Science and Technology”.  Which is why most, if not all of them are scientists.  By choosing scientists to be in the leading positions in the policy making arm of the governments, results in policies that favor science over technology.  There is a lot of good science that can be performed in developing countries specific to the inherent uniqueness of their surroundings. Research in developing the right kinds of seeds, development of drugs against local diseases, material for construction suited to the local climate and terrain etc. are all worthwhile areas of research. But research in more general areas do not get the Return On Investment (ROI) as it does in developed world due to longer gestation period and lack of entrepreneurial structure.  By contrast, investments in technology are more immediate and contribute to a rapid creation of wealth.  The eight hundred companies created by just the MIT alumni, generate $60 billion every year.  Most in the Chinese Communist Party leadership have engineering degrees. I would argue that US was an ascendant power when engineers like Ford, Hughes, Hewlett Packard ran the companies, and has started to go down with leaders having MBA degrees.

Trying to formulate a science and technology (S&T) policy in the absence of a strategic development policy is like putting horse before a non existing cart. The web sites of the fifteen departments under the Ministry of S&T, have only a couple that have lists of projects. Most of the activities are procedural in nature. The research institutes are in many instances conducting developments of products that are implementations of existing products. It is a case of scientists attempting to do engineering.

There are some instances of commendable development under the leadership of Dr. Atta ur-Rehman in the recent past. Raising the salaries of teachers and investment in the infrastructure were steps in the right direction. Similarly increasing scholarships for studies abroad was a long term investment that will surely bring rewards. But these to me are hygiene factors. Identifying technical areas like biotechnology and nanotechnology as areas of investment are the result of bottom-up academic-centric thinking.

The first and foremost need is to identify markets of strategic importance that we would like to excel globally. In a highly connected world, the leaders of the respective markets tend to take the lion’s share of it. For any country to excel in any market there has to be something inherent in the eco system of the country that gives it an unfair advantage compared to other countries. If it was simply a matter of throwing money, then the oil rich Arab countries would be dominating many areas of the global market. In reality they are no where to be seen despite their incredible wealth. Timing is equally important in terms of investing in a particular market. Being too early results in a lower ROI due to small market size; being too late results in competition with established large players. Being a leader in a particular market takes a huge amount of human and monetary resources. So only a few markets can be realistically targeted. Nokia in Finland generates $60 billion in sales annually. It employs 40,000 engineers in its R&D. Pakistan produces only 10,000 engineers every year.

Mathematics is the language of both technology and science. My experience during running a technology company in Pakistan left a lot to be desired in the area of mathematics. This is very unfortunate as Pakistanis are inherently very good at mathematics. My sense is that the lack of capability is due to lack of good teachers. If there is anything worth importing from India, it is their mathematics teachers from Southern India. If that is too difficult to achieve due to political reasons, there are many other countries like Turkey where teachers could be brought in from to develop our teacher training programs.

Focus on high margin higher tech products. It is impossible to maintain the seventh largest armed forces in the world based on the export of grey cloth and textiles. The bulk of value creation in the world has moved away from manufacturing to Intellectual Property based products and services. We are lucky to have the geographic proximity to China, which is the manufacturing super power of the world. We are also very fortunate to have an all-weather relationship with her. The development of JF-17 jet fighter and PAKSAT-IR satellite in collaboration with China are steps in the right direction. This strategy would free a lot of capital from having to invest upfront in the manufacturing infrastructure. We should make learning Chinese mandatory in engineering universities.

Just like narrow focus is needed in identifying markets, the investment in infrastructure for achieving excellence can only be done effectively in one or two regions. Even in developed countries there are only a handful of centers of excellence like the Silicon Valley, Bangalore or the 128 technology highway. Once the market has been identified, we need to identify the region for making it happen.

We need to create and grow the engineer-entrepreneur class that under stands how to effectively compete in a global market. No amount of technology and research is any good if it cannot provide a return on investment. This can only be achieved under the leadership of a civilian entrepreneur class. Our existing Seth class is totally unfit for the task at hand. Pakistan is fortunate in this regards in having a large technical diaspora. Some of whom have now started to return. Organization of Pakistani Entrepreneurs of North America (OPEN) is engaged in Pakistan in conjunction with MIT in encouraging entrepreneurs in the IT area through Business Acceleration Plan competitions and the establishment of an angel network. OPEN is interested in starting a chapter in Punjab next, so that we can provide mentoring in areas other than IT.

There is a need for a cross department, industry, academia, defense think-tank that identifies the handful of narrow markets that the country will focus on excelling. Some of the global markets that could be potential candidates are listed below with their dollar size and the local advantage:

1. Unmanned Aircraft Vehicles ($12 billion). Domain knowledge of using them.
2. Video games ($40 Billion). Large number of software engineers
3. Medical Devices ($100 billion only in the US). Access to sales channels through the existing surgical tools industry.
4. Health IT. ($50 Billion). Software engineers and need to deliver low cost healthcare to a large and distributed population.
5. Micro Satellite and novel launch vehicles.

These are all innovation driven nascent markets with no dominant player. It is possible to buy some of the early leaders in the West at very low valuations in the current market to get a head start. I have just glossed over these categories. Within each market are a number of underlying technologies. The food chain in each market is quite sophisticated and offers opportunities that can be incrementally exploited.

Pakistan currently exports goods worth $19Billion each year. The technology based exports are a mere $200 million. Software exports are $2.8B and military sales $300 M. While these are small numbers for a country of 180 million people, they are the early rumblings of a high tech and high margin industry in a historically agricultural society.

The principal challenges in technology are fundamentally social in nature. They are:

1. Education system geared towards creativity.
2. High quality engineer-entrepreneur class that has a global vision.
3. Secure and inviting society with good infrastructure.
4. Trust in private enterprise with public and defense funding.
5. Protection of Intellectual Property.
6. Creation of Venture Capital.

The photo of the fort at Attock, taken by a British photographer William Baker in 1863, is the birth place of the famous hindu mathematician Panini. Panini was born in 520 BC and is credited as the forerunner of the modern formal language theory used to specify computer languages. Attock was the center of the Gandhara civilization that rose in 600 B.C. The fort was constructed during Akbar’s reign in 1581 and served well to protect his empire. During this period European nations of Holland, Spain, France and Britain were developing the technology of putting guns on sea faring vessels.

The great moghul empire was overwhelmed because they did not develop this technology. In fact the inhabitants of a very small and remote island got to rule the world because they perfected this technology.

Had Akbar invested in developing a seafaring Navy, the photo of the fort could easily have been of a Scottish Fort taken by an Indian. As luck would have it the British Army is once again roaming just 100 miles West of this fort today.

The Karakoram Highway that connects Pakistan with China ends very close to Attock. Pakistan’s premier technology center of Aeronautical Complex at Kamra is just few miles East of Attock.

Figure 1 Gandhara Airport, Islamabad

With the development of Islamabad Airport, NUST, GIK Institute, UET, Heavy Mechanical Complex, College of Aeronautical engineering , PINSTECH etc., the region between Islamabad and Attock is primed to become the hub of technology with the right kind of vision and leadership in technology and science. This region was great in six century BC, magnificent in the sixteenth and could once again become a model modern society where sub-continent sensibilities blend in with the Chinese and Western technologies to raise the quality of life of the surrounding regions.

This blog also appeared at Pakistaniat.com. You can see the comments that people have left there that add to it.

Tweet This Post

by Imran H. Khan

As a teenager trying to decide what direction to take my life, I vacillated between the vision of the future painted by Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World“/Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” and Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged“/”Fountain Head“. Growing up in Pakistan, I could readily identify with Ayn Rand; and came to the conclusion that it is Prime Movers who create great societies and countries. Prime movers can exist in a number of specialties, adding value to the society in their respective domains. But within the spectrum of Prime Movers, engineer-entrepreneurs are the cream of the crop. This is in evidence in all the dominant countries of the world today. In late 90’s, a group of Pakistani American business leaders got together to create Organization of Pakistani Entrepreneurs of North America (OPEN) in Boston. Since then five new OPEN chapters have come into being in different US large cities. We celebrated the Tenth Anniversary of OPEN’s founding in October last year. I am continuously amazed at the level of commitment and charity by OPEN’s charter members who contribute their precious time and money to galvanize entrepreneurism within the Pakistani American community.

This is manifestly evident by visiting their web sites at

http://www.opensiliconvalley.org/

http://www.openwashingtondc.org/

http://open-newengland.com/

http://www.opennyc.org/

http://www.open-chicago.org/

http://www.open-houston.org/

It is relatively easy to start an organization, but very difficult to grow and sustain it at an ever increasing manner over the years. OPEN’s success in doing so is remarkable for such a small and young community; transitioning from the immigrant status and struggling against adverse stereo typing and press. I wrote an article capturing the Tenth Anniversary Event that provides some historical back drop to OPEN that is provided below.

Ten Years of Connecting People with Ideas

Download (PDF, 374.88KB)

Tweet This Post

My company introduced a new data visualization product called NZR earlier this year. It has since been downloaded and used by hundreds of programmers around the world. This is an unashamed plug for that product.

Printf has been a very useful function in debugging and visualizing the program flow and the data in every conceivable application. As the applications have grown in sophistication and speed, there has been an ever widening gap between the tools necessary to debug and what has been available. A new tool, called NZR, acts as a standalone application that is used to provide insights into the inner working of a program. It provides a real time 3D space to render different types of data that are being manipulated. It does so in a minimally invasive way, which helps in the debugging of real time systems. Real time systems are notorious for changing their behavior as increased instrumentation is used to expose the behavior and problems.

NZR is a Window’s tm application that exposes a 3D space to other window’s applications. A C++ library with an associated application programmers interface (API) exposes a simple interface to an application, enabling it to place a variety of objects in the NZR’s space. These objects are:

Displayable Objects
Each displayable object has two verbs that allow inserting and removing it from the NZR’s 3D space. They are “place” and “remove”.

• nzrText: Used for displaying text.
• nzrImage: Used for displaying images or other two dimensional data.
• nzrPoints: For displaying points.
• nzrGraphs: Used for displaying one dimensional data.
• nzrVolume: Used for displaying three dimensional data.
• nzrSphere: For displaying spheres.
• nzrPolyline: Used for displaying an arbitrarily shaped line in three dimensions.
• nzrOutline: Used for displaying a three dimensional outline.
• nzrFile: Used to insert a jpeg or 3ds file into the NZR space.

Support Objects
• nzrDisplay: This object allows the control of display attributes of objects that can be rendered. These attributes are Position, Color, scale, opacity, lighting model and orientation
• nzrLocalServer: Every application needs to instantiate this object. It moves the data from the server application to NZR. NZR is considered a visualization client and the nzr application is considered a data server. The server pushes the data to the client. nzrLocalServer has two useful member functions. The first one is “clearAll()” which clears all objects in the NZR space. The second is “render()” which makes all that has been placed, visible in the NZR space.
• nzrCamera: This object is used to set the viewpoint in the NZR space. The optimal values can be interactively established by setting the viewpoint and then reading the camera values from the dialog box in the scDoc window in NZR.
• nzrBackground: Used to set the back ground color.
• nzrLight: Used for setting the lights in the scene. The color, intensity, focal point and position can be selected. There are three types of lights available, namely headlight, scenelight and cameralight.

Code Flow
The typical code flow for using a nzr object is as follows:

• Instantiate the object and connect it with the nzrLocalServer object.
• Set the display attributes using the nzrDisplay object.
• Set the object specific attributes.
• Place the object in the NZR’s 3D space using the place function associated with each object.
• The object can be selectively removed from the scene by calling the remove function associated with it.

Sample Application

The System Monitor application is available on line that shows the real time behavior. This application visualizes the CPU usage and IP traffic on a PC. It also captures the desktop window. The CPU usage of four processes is displayed using nzrVolume object. Color and opacity mapping is used to highlight the CPU usage by different processes. The IP traffic on the wire is shown in two ways. The packet length vs. time is graphed using nzrGraph object. The IP source and destination addresses are mapped as points in a 3D space. The first three octets are mapped as x, y and z positions. The fourth octet is used to color the associated glyph and text. This program displays every packet that is on the wire connected to the PC.
As the call to detecting packets is a blocking call, a separate thread is used to handle it. A simple mutex is used to ensure that only one thread is sending data to NZR at any one time.
This application called SystemMonitorII ,along with a number of simpler tutorials can be downloaded from

www.softserv-intl.us

This example is described in greater detail at the codeproject site.

Tweet This Post