Educational Stratification and Nation Building Process in Pakistan

Abstract Pakistan has celebrated seven decades of independence but misfortunately the nation is still divided into several ideologies, believes, ethnicities, regionalism, provincialism, political and social classes. Throughout the world, education plays a significant role in nation building but the terrible upshot in Pakistan is the division of nation in the field of education and learning. There are numerous umbrellas under which our educational system is running. Therefore, current study objects to measure educational stratification and its effect on nation building process in Pakistan. In this regard, this research mainly focuses on four major prevailing educational systems such as; privately managed schools, public schools, army public schools and madarsa (religious educational institution). Data were collected through focus group discussions and analyzed by applying grounded approach theory. Four major themes emerged after data examination. These are uniformity of curricular, equal opportunities, political and bureaucratic involvement and lack of moral education. Study finds that education system is badly lacking in uniform ideology and moral learning. Furthermore, the poor system of education is negatively affecting nation building in Pakistan by enhancing public distrust, discrimination and regionalism. The results of the present study may be helpful in finding the way for uniform educational system which provide learning opportunities to every child without thinking of their caste, religion, language, economic class, political affiliation and ethnicity.

Fast Video Encoding Using Spatio-Temporal Features and Ensemble Classification

Video Coding has evolved over the years and new compression standards are being developed at regular intervals. Latest video codecs such as High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) have improved compression efficiency to reduce the bit-rates of en coded streams. This improvement has resulted in high computational complexity that becomes a bottleneck in real-time implementation of these codecs. Reduction in this computational complexity without compromise on the video quality is a challenge. Another challenge in fast video encoding is the diverse nature of video content. Hence, there is need for development of intelligent techniques to reduce the computational complexity of latest video codecs that also adapt to the diverse nature of video data. Research in this thesis focuses on identification of local and global features ex tracted from video data that can be used to characterize the diverse content in video sequences. Texture variations and motion content in video sequence are quantified to categorize it into simple and complex video sequence. This informa tion is used to develop a content adaptive fast encoding framework to reduce the computational complexity of HEVC. Proposed framework performs equally well both for sequences with simple or complex video content without compromising on video quality. It has been tested with a large set of video sequences and shows promising results as compared to the other recent works. This research work also focuses on the use of machine learning based algorithms for fast encoding to significantly reduce the complexity of video codecs while keeping bit-rate and PSNR within limits in recent video standards like HEVC. Machine learning based techniques formulate encoding process as a classification problem and use features extracted from video data to model the classifiers that can assist in early predictions during encoding. A large set of spatial and temporal features is extracted from video data and a systematic approach is applied for optimal feature selection. Resultant optimal features are used to train a Random Forests based ensemble classifier for early selection of prediction modes and coding unit sizes in HEVC. Proposed technique has been evaluated with publicly available video data x sets. Experimental results show that the proposed approach significantly reduces the complexity of different profiles in HEVC without compromising on video qual ity and performs better than other existing fast video encoding implementations. Fast encoding methods developed in this research have also been validated using emerging applications of HEVC such as compression of light field images. Detailed analysis of different formats in light field image representation has been carried out to identify unique aspects that differentiate them from natural videos. These unique features are used in fast coding of light field images in various formats using HEVC. Experimental results show that proposed technique can be applied in fast coding of light field images without compromise on image quality. These results can be used as benchmark for future research on fast encoding of light field images. Hence, the fast video encoding methods developed in this research can be extended to other applications of image and video coding. These techniques can also be integrated in real life video encoding solutions to enable implementation of latest video codecs on embedded hardware platforms with limited processing power and memory.