Dormant Account Reactivation at Al–Shajar Capital

The case study highlights the importance of finding a simple and cost effective solution to a core business problem. It elaborates the cost effective approach of Al-Shajar Capital’s Management in reactivating its dormant client base in order to capitalize the post Polling Stock Market rally. In order to analyze its dormant client base, Al-Shajar Capital remodeled the exercise as a capstone project and awarded it to final year MBA students of IoBM-CBM. The study used a modified form of Doreén Pick’s Customer win back model to reactivate customers’ accounts, not actively trading in the market. A five-week, non-scripted warm calling session was conducted, followed by a detailed report and formal presentation. Due to operational issues and human resource limitation, the exercise was conducted on weekends. The study was a success as not only it was able to revert and activate majority of dormant client accounts but also left a positive impression on many non-returning clients

Design and development of broadband gap waveguide-based 0-dB couplers for Ka-band applications

The design and fabrication of a wideband millimetre-wave 0-dB coupler is proposed in this paper using gap waveguide technology for low-loss and high-power applications in 30-GHz frequency band. To overcome the fabrication challenges in millimetre-wave frequencies, the gap waveguide technique is utilised. Two gap waveguide-based coaxial- and waveguide-fed 0-dB couplers are designed with broadband performance, high return loss, acceptable coupling flatness and high isolation. For verifying the performance of the proposed structures, a prototype of the waveguide-fed 0-dB coupler is manufactured and measured. The measurement results show that the return and insertion losses and the isolation of the fabricated 0-dB coupler is better than 18 dB, 0.5 and 18 dB, respectively, in the specified frequency range from 26.2 to 34 GHz. Moreover, the breakdown power level of the proposed millimetre-wave structures is in kW orders to satisfy the high-power requirements

Design of a dual-CP gap waveguide fed aperture array antenna

A slot array antenna with dual-circular polarisation (CP) is presented in this paper. To overcome the fabrication and loss challenges in mm-wave frequencies, the gap waveguide technique is utilised. The right and left hand circular polarisation (RHCP and LHCP) radiations are achieved using slots-fed stepped septum polariser on the longitudinal slot arrays. The waveguides and feeding layer are based on ridge gap waveguide. The experimental results demonstrate the |S-11| and axial ratio of proposed antenna array are lower than -10 and 2 dB, respectively over the frequency range of 29.1-31.7 GHz. The proposed antenna exhibits the measured peak gain of 27.2 dBic at 30.2 GHz. The results prove that the proposed array antenna is a brilliant choice for 30 GHz-band applications and could be developed to realise larger dual-polarised planar arrays

Call census, habitat suitability modeling and local communities’ perceptions for the conservation of a globally threatened avian flagship species

The Western tragopan (Tragopan melanocephalus) is recorded in the IUCN Red List of 2017 as a Vulnerable bird species in Pakistan.  This study was conducted to investigate and resolve the conservation challenges surrounding the species in two major habitat zones - Salkhala Game Reserve and Machiara National Park. The study was arranged in May-June 2020 for the call count census. Local residents’ perceptions and a habitat suitability map were developed for the species using MaxEnt model based on previously recorded occurrence points as well as recorded in the survey. A total of 26 western Tragopans were identified by call count during the sampling period. Results of modeling habitat suitability of the Western tragopan showed that the species suitable habitats are small and patchy in Pakistan. We found that the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) with 40.6 percent contribution was the most important variable in shaping the species distribution. Our model identified some new suitable patches which can be the target of future field monitoring for finding new populations of the species. This study provides valuable information for conservation of Western tragopan a globally threatened avian flagship species in Pakistan

The Impact of Population Growth on Economic Growth of Pakistan

In literature, it appears a divergence of opinion among different economists and social scientist regarding the impact of growing population on economic growth. The main objective of this paper is to analyze the impact of population growth on the economic growth of Pakistan, to what extent the growing population contributes in the economy. In order to empirically investigate the scenario quantitative techniques have been used. Both the dependent and independent variables are numerical of the simple regression analysis is enough to analyze the power of the model. The findings of this empirical study indicates that there is a positive relationships between population growth and economic growth but there is a negative relationship between growth and youth unemployment

EFFECT OF INOCULATION METHODS OF BIOZOTE-MAX (PLANT GROWTH PROMOTING RHIZOBACTERIA-PGPR) ON GROWTH AND YIELD OF RICE UNDER NATURALLY SALT-AFFECTED SOIL

A field experiment was carried out at the experimental farm of Soil Salinity Research Institute, Pindi Bhattian during 2016-17 to assess evaluate different Rhizobial inoculation methods on growth and yield of rice (Oryza sativa) cv. Basmati-385 under naturally salt-affected soil (pH= 8.12, ECe= 7.88 dS m-1and SAR=24.96). Seeds of rice were inoculated with Biozote–Max (Plant Growth Promoting Rhizobacteria-PGPR) produced in Soil Biology and Biotechnology Research Programme of Land Resources Research Institute, National Agricultural research Centre (NARC), Islamabad under PARC-Agrotech. Company (Pvt) Ltd. NARC, Islamabad in three ways i.e. rice seeds inoculated for direct seeding and nursery and dipping seedling roots in the solutions of these rhizobial strains comparable of control un-inoculated (control) by each inoculation method. The performances of Rhizobial strain Biozote–Max used as seed and seedling root dipping inoculation were superior to uninoculated control in all the parameters of the rice crop. Among the treatments, seed and seedling root dipping inoculation with Rhizobial strain Biozote–Max performed best in recording plant height, panicle length, number of tillers, 1000-grain weight and grain yield of rice crop. Maximum tillering was observed with all strains under different inoculation methods. Although, the strains performed better as compared to control, however, dipping of nursery roots produced significantly higher yield followed by seed inoculation for direct seeding. Overall, among all the inoculation methods seedling root dipping produced comparable paddy yield. The highest paddy yield (367 g m-2) was harvested with SBCC (M8) seed inoculation which was 13% more than that of un-inoculated (control)

Machine Learning Approach to Predict Quality Parameters for Bacterial Consortium-Treated Hospital Wastewater and Phytotoxicity Assessment on Radish, Cauliflower, Hot Pepper, Rice and Wheat Crops

Raw hospital wastewater is a source of excessive heavy metals and pharmaceutical pol-lutants. In water-stressed countries such as Pakistan, the practice of unsafe reuse by local farmers for crop irrigation is of major concern. In our previous work, we developed a low-cost bacterial consortium wastewater treatment method. Here, in a two-part study, we first aimed to find what physico-chemical parameters were the most important for differentiating consortium-treated and untreated wastewater for its safe reuse. This was achieved using a Kruskal–Wallis test on a suite of physico-chemical measurements to find those parameters which were differentially abundant between consortium-treated and untreated wastewater. The differentially abundant parameters were then input to a Random Forest classifier. The classifier showed that ‘turbidity’ was the most influential parameter for predicting biotreatment. In the second part of our study, we wanted to know if the consortium-treated wastewater was safe for crop irrigation. We therefore carried out a plant growth experiment using a range of popular crop plants in Pakistan (Radish, Cauliflower, Hot pepper, Rice and Wheat), which were grown using irrigation from consortium-treated and untreated hospital wastewater at a range of dilutions (turbidity levels) and performed a phytotoxicity assessment. Our results showed an increasing trend in germination indices and a decreasing one in phytotoxicity indices in plants after irrigation with consortium-treated hospital wastewater (at each dilution/turbidity measure). The comparative study of growth between plants showed the following trend: Cauliflower > Radish > Wheat > Rice > Hot pepper. Cauliflower was the most adaptive plant (PI: −0.28, −0.13, −0.16, −0.06) for the treated hospital wastewater, while hot pepper was susceptible for reuse; hence, we conclude that bacterial consortium-treated hospital wastewater is safe for reuse for the irrigation of cauliflower, radish, wheat and rice. We further conclude that turbidity is the most influential parameter for predicting bio-treatment efficiency prior to water reuse. This method, therefore, could represent a low-cost, low-tech and safe means for farmers to grow crops in water stressed areas

Optimized Sparse Matrix Operations for Reverse Mode Automatic Differentiation

Sparse matrix representations are ubiquitous in computational science and machine learning, leading to significant reductions in compute time, in comparison to dense representation, for problems that have local connectivity. The adoption of sparse representation in leading ML frameworks such as PyTorch is incomplete, however, with support for both automatic differentiation and GPU acceleration missing. In this work, we present an implementation of a CSR-based sparse matrix wrapper for PyTorch with CUDA acceleration for basic matrix operations, as well as automatic differentiability. We also present several applications of the resulting sparse kernels to optimization problems, demonstrating ease of implementation and performance measurements versus their dense counterparts