Research and Academic Collaborations
Since its inception, DSU has been committed to becoming an institution of international standards and has been following curricula that are in line with international practices. In addition to awarding credit for equivalent online courses offered by foreign universities like MIT, Stanford, Caltech etc. and taken through edX or Coursera, DSU has been collaborating with foreign universities and organizations to facilitate research and student/faculty exchange programs. Some of these are described in the following text:
DSU signed an MoU with Eurasia Institute for International Education (EIIE), Berlin, Germany to establish collaborative linkages with German universities in order to promote the exchange of students and faculty. In this regard, DSU conducted German language classes taught by native German teachers, Dr. Edgar Knispel and Mr. Stephan Guttzeit. This MoU also allowed students of DSU to attend a three-week summer camp in Berlin, Germany. In addition, a German Academic Counsellor, Ms. Ksenia Naberezhneva, is working at DSU to promote higher education opportunities for Pakistani students in Germany.
DSU signed an MoU with the Technical University of Applied Sciences, Wildau (TUAS-Wildau), Germany, to establish collaboration in teaching and research activities. TUAS-Wildau has a strong academic and research background in Engineering, Information Technology, Bio-Technology, Bio-Informatics, Renewable Energy, Logistics and Management Sciences. Therefore, there is potential for strong synergy between DSU and TUAS-Wildau. Under this MoU, students of DSU will be able to study for one or two semesters at TUAS-Wildau and can take up an industrial internship, arranged by TUAS-Wildau, in Germany. Other areas of collaboration covered by the MoU include exchange of faculty members, transfer of technology for industries, businesses and enterprises, specialized summer camps tailored to the requirements of DSU and the launch of joint degree programs.
DSU has also partnered with the Senior Experten Service (SES) Bonn, Germany, a non-profit organization. SES provides the services of highly educated and experienced German scholars for training/assistance of 2-3 weeks to universities around the world with funding from the Government of Germany. Universities in the developing countries are not charged for their services. However, the host university has to pay a nominal honorarium per day and provide boarding, lodging and local transport facilities to the Senior Experts.
The German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) granted €6000 to DSU to develop a Text-to-Speech for Urdu Synthesis Application. This project will investigate Urdu intonation and prosodic features in relation to the Urdu syntax. DSU will work on the syntactic analysis and creation of a tree-bank and syntactic parser for Urdu.
Rhodes and Schwarz, Germany provided a Spectrum Analyzer and an Analog Signal Generator to DSU for research.
DSU has been nominated as a CUDA Teaching Center by NVIDIA, USA, the world leader in visual computing. CUDA is a parallel computing platform and programming model that enables dramatic increases in computing performance by harnessing the power of NVIDIA GPU accelerators. CUDA Teaching Centers are recognized institutions that have incorporated GPU computing techniques into mainstream computer programming curricula. DSU is committed to providing high quality parallel computing education and research opportunities to students and faculty members.
DSU signed an MoU with Chengdu University (CDU), China in January 2015. This MoU serves as the bedrock for cooperation between DSU and CDU. The scope of the cooperation includes exchange of faculty in mutually agreed areas of research, student mobility programs, exchange of journals, tutorials and academic work.
DSU signed an MoU with AIMST University, Penang, Malaysia to collaborate for academic and research activities. This MoU facilitates student and faculty mobility. Selected students of DSU go to the AIMST University for a semester and some students are sent for a 4 weeks internship only. The university has also helped train the faculty of DSU in academic leadership and planning.
DSU signed a wide-ranging MoU with Bilkent University (BU), Turkey, for the exchange of students and research initiatives. A delegation from DSU, on invitation from Turkish universities, recently visited BU where they were welcomed by Dr. Levent Onural, Dean, BU and his team. Dr. Onural encouraged the delegation to pursue a mutually beneficial collaboration between DSU and BU as both universities share many commonalities in their visions and missions.
DSU signed an MoU for Research, Development and Innovation with the Institute of Cost and Management Accountants of Pakistan (ICMAP). Under this MoU, declared as an RDI Agreement, the Research and Planning (R&P) Committee of ICMAP and the Office of Research, Innovation and Collaboration (ORIC) of DSU intend to collaborate for a range of RDI efforts. Thus, through this agreement, DSU and ICMAP have become research partners and will collaborate through joint efforts in areas of mutual interests. The agreement also covers exchange of information, scholastic and development material, and sharing and advancing of ideas.
DSU has signed an MoU with Pakistan Standards and Quality Control Authority (PSQCA) to jointly explore and undertake market-oriented research and development projects. The MoU focuses on developing linkages in sharing human and material resources in order to undertake and promote need-based/demand-driven standardization and quality control/assurance education programs and transfer of technology to the industry.
Intel USA provided DSU with 10 Intel Galileo Gen 2 Dev Boards for research.
The University of Colorado, USA allocated a funding of Rs. 0.2m for joint research in natural language processing.
King Abdul Aziz University, Jeddah has agreed to undertake joint research in Virtual 3D Computing and provide a research grant of SR 15,000.
Joint research has also started in high performance computing with Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore.
