Muhammad Fahad Khan

Controlling Home Appliances Remotely through Voice Command

Controlling appliances is a main part of automation. The main object of Home automation is to provide a wireless communication link of home appliances to the remote user. The main objective of this work is to make such a system which controls the home appliances remotely. This paper discusses two methods of controlling home appliances one is via voice to text SMS and other is to use the mobile as a remote control, this system will provide a benefit to the elderly and disable people and also to those who are unaware of typing an SMS.

Transference and retrieval of voice message over low signal strength in satellite communication

This paper presents a method of transferring voice using short messaging service in satellite communication system. The method is especially applicable in a situation where signal strength is low and voice call is not possible. In a tunnel, basement or environment with bad climate conditions, signal strength usually gets weak which make voice call difficult but SMS works in such situation. An application has been developed using J2ME language in order to test the proposed method. For experimentation, Thuraya SG-2520 satellite phone has been used.

Skills, Competitiveness and Productivity

This study reviews selected indicators on skills and productivity for the period 2000-2008 using labour force survey data. The review of the labour market demonstrates the need of enhancement of skills as well as improved access to skills and education which are necessary to enter a virtuous circle of higher productivity, employment, incomes growth, and development. Without a workforce that is continuously acquiring new and improved skills, it will be difficult for Pakistan to be competitive in the globalizing world. The analysis clearly emphasizes the need for reforms in the technical and vocational education and training system.

Transference and retrieval of compress voice message over low signal strength in satellite communication

This paper presents the comparison of compression algorithms for voice transferring method over SMS in satellite communication. Voice transferring method over SMS is useful in situations when signal strength is low and due to poor signal strength voice call connection is not possible to initiate or signal dropped during voice call. This method has one serious flaw that it produces large number of SMS while converting voice into SMS. Such issue is catered to some extend by employing any compression algorithm. In this paper our major aim is to find best compression scheme for said method, for that purpose we compare 6 different types of compression algorithms which are; LZW (Lempel-Ziv-Welch), Huffman coding, PPM (Prediction by partial matching), Arithmetic Coding (AC), BWT (Burrows-Wheeler-Transform), LZMA (Lempel-ZivMarkov chain).This paper provides an alternative way of sending voice using satellite communication system through SMS. Voice transferring method over SMS is useful in situations when signal strength is low and due to poor signal strength voice call connection is not possible to initiate or signal is dropped during voice call. So we record voice, apply adaptive Wiener filter to remove background noise, detect voice segments using voice activity detector (VAD) and discard unvoiced segment of voice and after this apply compression. We compare six different types of compression algorithms; Lempel-Ziv-Welch (LZW), Huffman coding, prediction by partial matching (PPM), arithmetic coding (AC), Burrows-Wheeler-transform (BWT) and Lempel-Ziv-Markov chain (LZMA). Each compression scheme achieves an average compression ratio of 16.22, 10.22, 25.33, 14.77, 21 and 18.44 respectively. For experimentation, first we develop an application using Java 2 Platform, Micro Edition (J2ME) language and use Thuraya SG-2520 satellite phone. Pro...