Lahore University of Management Sciences

Research Centres at LUMS

Overview

Research is a vital element in the attainment of the overall mission of LUMS. To ensure quality instruction, the faculty is actively engaged in research, which expands the frontiers of knowledge in their own respective fields of specialisation. Active research keeps the faculty in touch with the current industry environment and also enables them to gauge future directions. The University aims to facilitate frequent information exchange by keeping in touch with the public sector, international agencies, academia, industry and NGOs

The School of Humanities and Social Sciences has a vibrant research programme. Faculty is carrying out research in a diverse range of themes including corporate governance, devolution, Pakistan-India Trade, devaluation and macro stability, welfare implications of migration policies, constitutional history of Pakistan and coping mechanism in earthquake affected areas. SHSS places special emphasis on research programmes with a social focus. Among them is the RISEPAK initiative which won the Stockholm Challenge Award 2006 in the public administration category. The project is designed to provide web-based information portal to assist in relief effort in the 2005 earthquake affected areas. The project is an example of collaboration between academics from LUMS, Kennedy School of Government and Pomona College, the World Bank, NGOs, the private sector and government organizations. It is also an example of the social responsiveness and commitment of the students and faculty at LUMS.

SHSS is actively engaged in international collaborations. One such research collaboration led by Dr. Ali Cheema is with the Centre for the Future State (IDS, Sussex). SHSS is also collaborating with faculty in the Kennedy School of Government and the University of Chicago in the collection, compilation and analysis of data sets of public companies. Another faculty member, Dr. Faisal Bari, is involved in a research project on ‘outcomes of education’ involving universities of Cambridge, Edinburgh and Oxford in collaboration with the Human Development Centre Islamabad and partner institutions in Ghana, Kenya and India. The Economics department has collaborated in research with faculty in several universities including McGill University, the University of Essex and the Southern Illinois University at Carbondale and published jointly in academic journals..

The fields of information and communication technologies have seen an explosive growth in the last few years. The Department of Computer Science at LUMS leverages this tremendous growth by performing innovative research. The department has secured over Rs. 24 million in research grants from international entities like Cisco and Microsoft as well as local entities like HEC, PTCL and others. Eight graduate laboratories of the department house over 200 graduate students who are conducting research in a number of areas of Computer Science and Computer Engineering like VLSI, Networking, Multimedia, Robotics and so on. During the 2005-2006 academic year, the department has published over 31 international and local journal and conference papers. In 2006, this department proudly awarded a PhD degree to Tauqeer Hussain, its first PhD graduate, for successfully defending his dissertation on “Improving Conceptual Modeling in Database Design”. More recently, a PhD has been awarded to Onaiza Maqbool, for her successful thesis on “Architecture Recovery of Legacy Software Systems using Unsupervised Machine Learning Techniques”