The goal of Khiva is to guide a group of motivated students in FEE through their final year project. The project ideas I have are all in the Computer Engineering field (Computer Architecture, VLSI design, Computer-Aided Design (CAD) tool design, etc.). If you are interested in doing a project in this field, I'm definitely interested in hearing from you.

Who am I?

I know, you must be thinking, "who are you, anyway"? Well, for now it should suffice to say that I am Bilal Zafar and I graduated from GIKI in May of 2000 (i.e., 6th batch, FEE). I'm doing my PhD in Computer Engineering at the University of Southern California (USC). This summer I'm at Intel working with the Platform Architecture Research group as an intern.

So, now that you know about me what you need to know, let's get to work.

 What am I trying to do here?

During the last couple of years, I've come across several interesting research problem. Some are harder than others, but all of them have at least two things in common:

1. They are all in the Computer Engineering area. That is, they deal with topics in computer architecture, VLSI circuit design and, may be, computer-aided (CAD) tool design.
2. In my view, they are all doable in one year time frame.

Through Khiva wish to share these ideas with students who might be interested in working on one of these problems. Our goal would be to attack a meaningful research problem and publish our findings in a reputed international conference and/or journal.

What do you get out of it?

As anyone who is into graduate studies would tell you, nothing improves your chances of getting admission (and/or financial aid) to graduate school more than a conference or journal paper. So, if you are interested in going for higher studies, you should seriously consider this.

Even though, I personally believe that research is a wonderful way of personal growth irrespective of what your job is, but I will be misleading you if I told you that doing a research-oriented project will help you get a job in, say, Wapda. Besides, you know what will help to get a job in Wapda, anyway!

If whatever you've read so far does not ring any bells, doesn't excite you, doesn't interest you, you probably want to stop here. The rest of this page is geared for those who want an active part in this project.

How will we do it?

From my standpoint, the first question is how do I get good students interested in this. I have no clue how I will go about doing that but once we have decided that we will be working on this, we will start by discussing the general description of the various projects I have in mind. You will decide which of those projects you wish to do. Alternatively, you can propose another project and we can discuss if that will make a useful investment of our time. Once the project is decided, we will begin by doing a thorough study of the background material, understanding the state-of-the-art in the field and, finally, understand the exact problem and its plausible solutions. Next, we will explore the solution and document our work. Of course, exploring the solution means developing some platform to test our hypothesis. Typically, we would use some simulation software to verify goodness of our solutions. This may involve some programming in C/C++, but of course, all such aspects will be discussed once we get to that stage.

More precisely, following is the tentative sequence of steps we will follow:

• Invite interested students to take a short quiz on various topics in computer engineering.
• Discuss the project with the winners of the quiz. Students select the project.
• Background study
• Motivation and state-of-the-art
• Problem formulation
• Previous work
• Solution proposition
• Experimentation
• Analysis
• Documentation

Responsibilities

My primary responsibilities will be:

• to provide you with reading material to learn what you need to learn
• to help you understand background material and the problem
• to provide feedback on your progress
• to be available for regular discussions and meetings during every phase of the project
• to provide you with any resources, such as software tools, etc.,  that I can

In essence, I will be operating as a remote project advisor. I know that most faculty members are too busy to get involved in individual projects, in a way, I'll serve as a "technical advisor". Needless to say, I won't have any administrative role.

Apart from actually 'doing' the project, you will be responsible for providing me with regular updates and making yourself available for progress meetings. My guess is that we will meet, either online or over the phone, once every week. Of course, this will depend on various factors including my schedule as well as yours. Yes, I too have exams and courses and submission deadlines.

What sayst thou?

So, what do you say? Want to get started? Well, if that's case, go to the quiz page and shoot your answers to me. And of course, there's that PDA that you might get if you get the answers close enough.