Taslim Arefin Khan

University of British Columbia | UBC · Department of Computer Science

recent development emanating from RFID technology is Near Field Communication (NFC). Basically, NFC is a popular short range (< 10 cm) wireless communication technology with applications in areas sensitive to security and privacy concerns like contactless payment. Since NFC communications require very close proximity between two communicating devic...

The recent technological developments offer us a new generation of systems known as cyber-physical systems (CPSs). The emergence of CPSs introduces specialized networking and communication strategy, information technology, integrating them with physical world which enables the advancement of a new vision for the social facilities. A CPS is the inte...

Derailment due to uprooted or faulty rail blocks is an epoch-making problem in many developing countries such as Bangladesh, India, Kenya, etc. Such derailments result in both death tolls and loss of property. Low-resource settings and the paucity of networking infrastructure in remote rail areas of developing countries pose a challenge in devising...

Exploration of potential security threats and vulnerabilities of a real-time system specifically designed for detecting missing rail blocks in the context of developing countries is yet to be explored. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a new threat called power attack through exploiting vulnerability pertinent to the energy sources of the real-t...

Basic arithmetic operations are essential skills needed in our life, and this is no different for the visually impaired. However, working arithmetic out on paper is always a challenge for visually impaired people. This situation is exacerbated by low-resource settings due to a paucity of low-cost and easy-to-use solutions. As a remedy to this situa...

Successful defense against eavesdropping on near-field communication (NFC) vastly depends on careful analysis of eavesdropping and adopting a suitable defense mechanism based on the analysis. However, such an analysis and such an adoption of a defense mechanism are yet to be attempted in the literature, even though eavesdropping is considered as on...

In this paper we analyze Facebook’s Free Basics program, which provides free Internet access to a restricted set of web services. As the program grows to 60+ developing countries, an independent and data-driven audit of its scope and outreach is highly relevant to the ICTD community. We provide the first large scale empirical observations on how co...

Reading printed documents and writing on a paper pose a great challenge for visually-impaired people. Existing studies that attempt to solve these challenges are expensive and not feasible in low-income context. Moreover, these studies solve reading and writing problems separately. On the contrary, in this study, we propose FLight, a low-cost readi...

Pedestrian counting is required in diversified places such as shopping malls, touristic spots, etc., however, a low-cost solution to this problem is yet to be proposed in the literature. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a new solution for pedestrian counting that exploits only a small number of COTS sensors (94% less than that used in the exist...

People with visual impairment use Braille as a medium of textual representation having palpable dots. While the more privileged among us use OCR based text readers as preferential alternative, the lesser privileged ones are still bundling with conventional Braille tools. Our endeavor in this paper is to develop a low-cost and easy-to-use solution f...

Air pollution is a serious threat to public health. The city residents often spend significant time in public transports owing to long traffic tailbacks. So, the air quality inside public transports is an important factor that needs to be considered for the welfare of city residents. In this paper, we study the air quality inside public transports...

Indoor localization or zonification in disaster affected settings is a challenging research problem. Existing studies encompass localization and tracking of first-responders or fire fighters using wireless sensor networks. In addition to that, fast evacuation, routing, and planning have also been proposed. However, the problem of locating survivors...

The post-disaster rescue work demands a real-time localization of the trapped workers in factories and industries for rapid evacuation. This real-time localization helps first-responders in targeting survivors by escalating post-disaster rescue work. However, existing literature is yet to address indoor localization in disaster affected settings. I...

In recent times, derailments due to uprooting rails on a railway track has become a banal and noteworthy occurrence in Bangladesh due to different reasons such as political unrest, mass protest, etc. However, the railway tracks in Bangladesh are yet to deploy an automated system that can prevent the losses due to derailments through early detection...

Both severity and frequency of disasters in highly-dense industries such as ready-made garment factories have increased to an alarming level in recent times. Technological advancement addresses a number of aspects of post-disaster rescue missions for such events, however, facilitating the missions through providing real-time information about the s...